Brewster Kahle builds a free digital library, Part 3

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library.html Now let's go for audio, and I'm going to go through these. So how much is there? Well, as best we can tell, there are about two to three million disks having been published -- so 78s, long-playing records and CDs -- or at least that's the largest archives of published materials we've been able to sort of point at. It costs about 10 dollars a piece to go and take a disk and put it online if you're doing things in volume. But we've found that the rights issues are really quite thorny. This is a fairly heavily litigated area, so we've found that there are niches in the music world that aren't served terribly well by the classic commercial publishing system. And we've been starting to make these available by going and offering shelf space on the net. In the United States it doesn't cost you to give something away. Right? If you give something to a charity or to the public, you get a pat on the back and a tax donation -- except on the net, where you can go broke. If you put up a video of your garage band and it starts getting heavily accessed, you can lose your guitars or your house. This doesn't make any sense. So we've offered unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth forever, for free, to anybody that has something to share that belongs in a library. And we've been getting a lot of takers. One is the rock 'n rollers. The rock 'n rollers had a tradition of sharing, as long as nobody made any money. You could -- Concert recordings, it's not the commercial recordings, but concert recordings, started by the Grateful Dead. And we get about two or three bands a day signing up. They give permission, and we get about 40 or 50 concerts a day. We have about 40,000 concerts, everything the Grateful Dead ever did, up on the net so that people can see it and listen to this material. So audio is possible to put up, but the rights issues are really pretty thorny. We've got a lot of collections now -- a couple hundred thousand items -- and it's growing over time. Moving images: if you think of theatrical releases, there are not that many of them. As best we can tell, there are about 150,000 to 200,000 movies ever that are really meant for a large-scale theatrical distribution. It's just not that many. But half of those were Indian. But anyway, it's doable, but we've only found about a thousand of these things that -- to be out-of-copyright. So we've digitized those and made those available. But we've found that there's lots of other types of movies that haven't really seen the light of day -- archival films. We've found, also, a lot of political films, a lot of amateur films, all sorts of things that are basically needing of a home, a permanent home. So we've been starting to make these available and it's grown to be very popular. We're not quite a YouTube; we tended towards longer-term things and also things that people can reuse and make into new movies, which has just been great fun. Television comes quite a bit larger. We started recording 20 channels of television 24 hours a day. It's sort of the biggest TiVo box you've ever seen. It's about a pedobyte, so far, of worldwide television -- Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Iraqi, Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC -- 24 hours a day. We put -- we only put one week up, which is mostly for cost reasons, which is the 9/11, sort of from 9/11/2001: for one week, what did the world see? CNN were saying that Palestinians were dancing in the streets. Were they? Let's look at the Palestinian television and find out. How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? And television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable, except by Jon Stewart, who does fabulous job. So anyway, television is, I would suggest, within our grasp. So 15 dollars per video hour and also about 100 dollars to 150 dollars per celluloid hour, we're able to go and get materials online very inexpensively and have them up on the net. And we've got, now, a lot of these materials. So we've got about 100,000 pieces up there. So books, music, video, software -- there's only 50,000 titles of it. Mostly the issues there are legal issues and breaking copy protections. But we've worked through some of those, but we've still got real problems in Washington. Well, we're best known as the World Wide Web. We've been archiving the World Wide Web since 1996. We take a snapshot of every website and all of the pages on it, every two months. And actually, it's really been pioneered by Alexa Internet, which donates this collection to the internet archive. And it's been growing along for the last 11 years and it's a fantastic resource. And we've made a "Way Back Machine" that you can then go and see old websites kind of the way they were. If you go and search on something, this is Google.com, the different versions of it that we have, this is what it looks like when it was an Alpha release and this is what it looked like at Stanford. So anyway, you've got basically an idea of where things came from. Mostly people want to see their old stuff out of this. If there's one thing that we want to learn from the Library of Alexandria version one, which is probably best known for burning, is: don't just have one copy. So we've started to -- We've made another copy of all of this and we actually put it back in the Library of Alexandria. So this is a picture of the internet archive at the Library of Alexandria. And we now have also another copy building up in Amsterdam. So we should put it in the San Andreas Fault Line in San Francisco, flood zone in Amsterdam and in the Middle East. Right, so anyway ... so we're hedging our bets here. If we go and put it in a couple more places, I think we'll be in good shape. There's a political and social question out of this. Is all of this, as we go digital, is it going to be public or private? There's some large companies that have seen this vision, that are doing large-scale digitization, but they're locking up the public domain. The question is: is that the world that we really want to live in? What's the role of the public versus the private as things go forward? How do we go and have a world where we both have libraries and publishing in the future, just as we basically benefited as we were growing up? So universal access to all knowledge -- I think it can be one of the greatest achievements of humankind, like the man on the moon or the Gutenberg Bible or the Library of Alexandria. It could be something that we're remembered for millennia for having achieved. And as I said before, I'll end with something that's carved above the door of the Carnegie Library -- Carnegie -- one of the great capitalists of this country -- carved above his legacy: "Free to the People." Thank you very much. Source: TED.com