Since the early 1990s, I’ve been pushing for a well-stocked national digital library system. The Obama White House so far has ignored the TeleRead idea as recently presented in the Huffington Post (and forwarded to White House staffer Shin Inouye on Oct. 23). But could we be getting there anyway?
Via the Reading 2.0 list, here’s an except from Harvard Professor Robert Darnton’s article in the New York Review of Books—about the Google Books controversy:
The most ambitious solution would transform Google’s digital database into a truly public library. That, of course, would require an act of Congress, one that would make a decisive break with the American habit of determining public issues by private lawsuit. The legislation would have to settle ancillary problems—how to adjust copyright, deal with orphan books, and compensate Google for its investment in digitizing—but it would have the advantage of clearing up a messy legal landscape and of giving the American people what they deserve: a national digital library equal to the needs of the twenty-first century. But it is not clear how Google would react to such a buyout.
As a very very small shareholder in Google, I say, “About time!” Google and Amazon at this point are well on the way to pre-empting public libraries. Should we really privatize such services? Google and Amazon, perhaps, could serve as contractors, and I like the idea of there being robust alternatives to government-supported libraries—some serious freedom-of-the-press issues arise. But let’s not let Google and the like displace public libraries. Hello, Obama? Your Google ties mustn’t compromise you.
More from the Darnton piece:
If state intervention is deemed to go too far against the American grain, a minimal solution could be devised for the private sector. Congress would have to intervene with legislation to protect the digitization of orphan works from lawsuits, but it would not need to appropriate funds. Instead, funding could come from a coalition of foundations. The digitizing, open-access distribution, and preservation of orphan works could be done by a nonprofit organization such as the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group that was built as a digital library of texts, images, and archived Web pages. In order to avoid conflict with interests in the current commercial market, the database would include only books in the public domain and orphan works. Its time span would increase as copyrights expired, and it could include an opt-in provision for rightsholders of books that are in copyright but out of print.
The work need not be done in haste. At the rate of a million books a year, we would have a great library, free and accessible to everyone, within a decade. And the job would be done right, with none of the missing pages, botched images, faulty editions, omitted artwork, censoring, and misconceived cataloging that mar Google’s enterprise. Bibliographers—who appear to play little or no part in Google’s enterprise—would direct operations along with computer engineers. Librarians would cooperate with both in order to assure the preservation of the books, another weak point in GBS, because Google is not committed to maintaining its corpus, and digitized texts easily degrade or become inaccessible.
This digitizing process could be subsidized as part of the Obama administration’s economic stimulus, and the overall cost, spread out over ten to twenty years, would be manageable, perhaps $750 million in all. Meanwhile, Google and anyone else would be free to exploit the commercial sector. The national digital library could be composed from the holdings of the Library of Congress alone or, failing that, from research libraries that have not opened all their collections to Google.
I quote the learned Harvard professor Robert Darnton: “Congress would have to intervene with legislation to protect the digitization of orphan works from lawsuits.”
Yeah, what the heck. The Berne Convention, which we have signed along with 164 other countries, certainly prohibits precisely what the professor wants Congress to do. It clearly states that protection isn’t dependent on an author registering or (by implication) making his contact information perpetually available to his government, to Google, or to anyone else. That’s what he’d have to do to prevent his books from being labeled orphans and stolen by the forced opt-in provisions of this settlement.
The all too obvious conclusion of what Berne says is this: You can’t treat orphan books any differently from any other books. For the full term of copyright and without exception, you need an author’s permission to publish, online or anywhere else. No permission, no publication. It is that simple. I might add, Congress can no more overrule a treaty obligation than it can override the Constitution.
Yet the learned professor, in his quite lengthy article, makes no mention of Berne or, indeed of any international treaty at all. Why is that? Is he ignorant of what they say or merely unwilling to raise any issue that upsets the agenda he wants to promote? Does he not know that Congress can’t, by a mere act of legislation overwrite treaty obligations? Perhaps he simply doesn’t care.
As a historian, Darnton ought to recognize the class to which he belongs, a group you might call the Unreflectively Selfish. All their thoughts revolved around themselves. They lack what G. K. Chesterton called the “moral imagination” to recognize evil when that evil doesn’t impact themselves and particularly so when they see some advantage to be derived from justifying the evil and providing it with a sham legal cover.
It’s why we had slavery and why it took a brutal war to bring slavery to an end. Historians such as himself were fond of pointing out that all great civilizations were built on the labor of slaves. Why should we be different? It’s why his historian colleagues in Germany, nationalistic liberals eager to glorify and justify a united Germany based on Darwinian concepts about superior races (Teutonism), laid the foundation for Nazism.
You can see the same foulness lurking behind legalized abortion, denying the humanity of an unborn child being the equivalent of ignoring the existence of our obligations under Berne. One very liberal English professor justified abortion to me by pointing to a young black man nearby and whispering, “That’s why we need abortion.” Aborting the children of the poor is a logical outcome of pro-welfare-state thinking as getting rid of severely disabled children and the chronically sick elderly is the logical outcome the so-called ‘health care reform’ that we’re now debating, You can find those ideas in the writings of one of its architects, Ezekiel Emanuel. Wikipedia bluntly describes him as: “a leading opponent of legalized euthanasia, sometimes called state-assisted suicide, and a proponent of a Guaranteed Healthcare Access Plan.”
Of course Prof. Darnton’s ambitions are much milder and the harm that will result mere peanuts in comparison. He merely wants lots of books for his research, which happens to be into the history of books. He wants digital books that don’t demand from him the bother of paying money or going to a physical library. And as a Harvard professor, he is well paid. Unlike those who be ripped off by his scheme, little known authors, he doesn’t need income from his books. Lacking moral imagination, he can’t put himself in their shoes. That’s why, in the quote I began with, he doesn’t say “lawsuits by outraged authors.” Doing that would humanize the victims he wants to render invisible. They have become blacks; they have become Jews; they have become fetuses; they become the dying elderly who can no longer contribute to our economy.
When you read history, keep in mind that its evils typically have two sources. The first is obvious: genuinely evil people such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao. The second is less obvious but equally important, the Unreflectively Selfish who lack the moral imagination to grasp the harm being done to others. It is they who provide critical support for that evil. (Stalin called them “useful idiots.”) It’s why Nazism had so little opposition from German academia. Tossing out Jewish professors meant lots of “Herr Professor’ promotions for those with the proper Aryan credentials. Most of the opposition came, as Einstein noted, from churches, both Catholic and Protestant.
In the case of the Google settlement, it’s the Unreflectively Selfish who, if they have a problem with the Google settlement, see in it a fear that it might become a Google monopoly and, as such, allow Google to charge more than they want to pay for access to the uncompensated labors of others. They have nothing against stealing. They just don’t want it to cost them much.
Inside their heads, one refrain continually echoes, “Me, me, me, me, me….” Their great dreams of the future, digital libraries or whatever, always revolve around themselves and neglect the rights of others.
–Michael W. Perry, Seattle, Editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II.
If there is a slim chance not to go to a library, physically, then why forcing it? Why? Because it’s sinful laziness? Let’s have all books we want at our desktops. “Orphan” isn’t just the right word for those books, isn’t that word “neglected”? Sorry my bad English