“The more information is free, the more opportunities for it to be collected, refined, packaged and made expensive,” said Stewart Brand, the technology visionary who developed the formulation. “The more it is expensive, the more workarounds to make it free. It’s a paradox. Each side makes the other true.”Universal access to all knowledge was a dream of the early internet. It’s an idea that Kahle has long championed. As the United States lurched to a halt in March 2020, he saw an opportunity.
Librarians are custodians. Kahle has spent his career working in tech, but he wants the future to behave a little more like the past. The Internet Archive’s lending program, developed long before the pandemic, involved scanning physical books and offering them to readers in its Open Library, a practice called controlled digital lending.
New technology means culture is delivered on demand, but not all culture. When Netflix shipped DVDs to customers, there were about 100,000 to choose from. Streaming, which has different economics, has reduced that to about 6,600 U.S. titles. Most are contemporary. Only a handful of movies on Netflix were made between 1940 and 1970.
“Digital is different than print because it is infinitely copyable and unprotectable,” said Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the guild and a copyright lawyer. “If anyone could call themselves a library, set up a website and do the exact same thing the archive did, writers would have absolutely no control over their work anymore.”“Most publishers are not purely profit-driven,” Rasenberger said. “If one were, you could imagine it might not allow libraries to have e-books at all.
The emergency library “was as limited as a small city library’s circulation level,” Kahle insisted. “This was always under control.” Some writers had second thoughts. N.K. Jemisin and Colson Whitehead deleted their critical tweets. Owen, asked last month by The New York Times if she stood by her tweets, responded by making her account private. Chuck Wendig, a science fiction writer, had tweeted that the emergency library was “piracy.” He was quoted in news reports and criticized by archive fans, and now has a post expressing regrets.
“Capitalists may be obnoxious and selfish and in firm need of restraint, but the truly dangerous people in this world are the true believers who want to impose their utopian vision on everyone else,” Preston said.