Creeva’s World 2.0

The Inter­net with it’s promise of a rev­o­lu­tion has suc­ceeded in it’s goal of chang­ing the land­scape of infor­ma­tion and how it is dis­sem­i­nated to the pub­lic at large.   We deal with issues that new media and remix­ing is caus­ing in the areas of old copy­right.   I’m one of those that bemoan the con­stant increas­ing of time before works enters into the pub­lic domain.   I would like to see more infor­ma­tion enter into the pub­lic domain quicker and I think the cre­ative com­mons idea is the future of copy­right law, but this isn’t about that.   It’s about the loss of pub­lic domain works.

It is true that efforts are under­way to save and col­lect media that exists in the pub­lic domain.   There are even peo­ple cre­at­ing new work specif­i­cally for the pub­lic domain.   We have libraries of pub­lic domain works and sites that col­lect infor­ma­tion form past web­sites.   Videos are being col­lected and main­tained where the copy­right slipped by and were not renewed in time.  These things are great.   How­ever there are too many peo­ple that could care less about the pub­lic domain or the ideas that spings out of it.

Most of the time pub­lic domain media is con­sid­ered old and out-dated.   Peo­ple want things that are new and excit­ing.  They want con­stant progress with no respect for the ideas of come from,  and don’t what forge from which the ideas have be tem­pered.  This leads to a loss of ideas, sto­ries, pic­tures and music.

I once had an argu­ment with some­one in my sup­port for the pub­lic domain.   I pointed out all the music and sto­ries that have been lost to the rav­ages of time and may never be recov­ered.   Their response was if it was pop­u­lar it never would have been lost.   This state­ment is almost as asi­nine as stat­ing that I have noth­ing to hide, so it’s a good idea to per­form sur­veil­lance on every­one.   While the lat­ter state­ment points to no respect to your own pri­vacy, let alone oth­ers.  The for­mer state­ment has no respect for what has been created.

While we can look at three hugely pop­u­lar sites for pub­lic domain media, Project Guten­berg, Archive.org, and Wikipedia; these are all very niche sites that serve a par­tic­u­lar pur­pose.   They each have a pri­mary focus in what they want to main­tain.  Since these are the big play­ers in their directed niche they are con­sid­ered one of the author­i­ta­tive sources for the type of pub­lic domain media and infor­ma­tion that is able to be retrieved from their site.   What about some of the niches that aren’t covered?

Project Guten­berg has a long stand­ing his­tory of sal­vaging books that have entered into the pub­lic domain.   They do a great ser­vice that lit­er­ally takes hun­dreds of vol­un­teers to take books form a print medium and con­vert it to dig­i­tal text avail­able to all.  They are known for their e-books, while they do have some other things that they try to main­tain, this is what they are known for.   If you are look­ing for a book that is in the pub­lic domain chances are you will be directed to them first.

Archive.org on the other hand, while author­i­ta­tive in some respects is the jack of all trades in the pub­lic domain sec­tor.   You would use them for web­site his­tory research using their way-back machine site, or you may check with them for pub­lic domain video or audio.   It is a hap­haz­ard gath­er­ing of peo­ple that seem to uti­lize the best of breed men­tal­ity, the prob­lem with being the jack of all trades, is some­times it’s a pain in the butt to use.   Archive.org’s usabil­ity is one of the worst of the main­stream big sites that I’ve used.  It’s hard to find exactly what you are look­ing for.

Then you have Wikipedia, which essen­tially the pub­lic domain research ency­clo­pe­dia.   Yes, there are issues with it.  Some­times you can’t trust.   Some­times it can be edited.  With all these prob­lems, it’s author­i­ta­tive.  You can’t do a Google search on a sub­ject most of the time with­out see­ing a Wikipedia link on the front page.   Peo­ple link to Wikipedia since it’s trusted and becomes the cumu­la­tive knowl­edge of human­ity over time or does it — the ques­tion will be dis­cussed in an upcom­ing blog article.

How­ever there is plenty of other types of infor­ma­tion and media that is not col­lected and ade­quately cat­a­loged so it’s easy to use for a lay­man.   There are for-profit com­pa­nies cat­a­loging and main­tain­ing repos­i­to­ries of pub­lic domain infor­ma­tion, but these com­pa­nies charge a fee for infor­ma­tion that truly and legally wants to be free.   It’s just that no one cares enough to invest the time or money to cre­ate archives.   I’m not say­ing com­pa­nies can’t make money from these ven­tures, but I think our higher insti­tu­tions and gov­ern­ments should take first run at them until they are large enough to be spun out into it’s own non-profit organization.

What type of infor­ma­tion am I talk­ing about?

Legal Tran­scripts

Archi­tec­tural Plans

Sheet Music

Video

Audio

Pho­tographs

Gen­eral Art

Etc, etc, — if it has been cre­ated it should be saved.

I will state of the big three men­tioned above, some of those dab­ble in all of these things, but not to any appre­cia­ble level that exists out­side of their pri­mary focus.   Yes there are niche sites, this whole thing started out of look­ing for pub­lic domain sheet music.    No site is author­i­ta­tive, they all have their own issues, and iron­i­cally enough they don’t nor­mally have the same data the other site has.    There is no rea­son for this, scans are not pro­pri­etary or unique, nor do they count as a deriv­a­tive work.

The other issue with this is global accep­tance and resources.  Most of the col­lec­tions of pub­lic domain works exists only within them­selves.   There is a lot of cross work done by uni­ver­si­ties scan­ning the exact same item to be in their col­lec­tion that another uni­ver­sity has already scanned.     This is wasted man power since their is no author­i­ta­tive repos­i­tory to put this infor­ma­tion into, or cross ref­er­ence against.   So this leads to the pop­u­lar stuff nor­mally being at the front of the list and most likely to be dupli­cated again and again and again, while the more obscure things are left unread and unfound.

Archive.org, Wikipedia, and Guten­berg all of some­thing else that these other niche sites do not have, global mir­rors.  Being an Amer­i­can I could eas­ily say the library of con­gress will even­tu­ally have every­thing pub­lic domain online.   The first part is if I actu­ally made that state­ment it would be naive on my part.   The sec­ond thing is that it means other coun­tries are count­ing on the United States to save the pub­lic domain data.   I’m sure we won’t put the same care to local trans­la­tion and books, com­pared to Amer­i­can edi­tions when it comes to preser­va­tion or pub­lic dis­sem­i­na­tion of the work.

I’m angry and annoyed.  I’ll be revis­it­ing this topic, but hope­fully this primer of where I am com­ing from is some­thing for you to think about and com­ment on.