Fungible Convictions

I have to admit I’m biased in favor of Google. I have friends who work in both the Cambridge and Mountain View offices. I’ve tried, and provided feedback on, every beta Google has produced. I worked for a group trying to get funding from its philanthropic arm, Google.org. And every time I hear CEO Eric Schmidt speak at a conference, he strikes me as one of the most intelligent, well-versed, sober, geektastic corporate leaders I can think of. (If you have an hour, this interview with the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta is definitely worth watching:

.)

So perhaps I’m biased when I don’t see a problem with Google archiving so-called orphan works, publications that have been abandoned by both author and publisher, are out of print, and are effectively if not technically out of copyright. I don’t see a problem with making available works that no one can easily see/acquire, that no one is promoting, and that no one is making money from—but that may, and often do, still have great value.

I’m also biased, however, in favor of one of the great archival minds of our age, Robert Darnton:

Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information. And without competition, they say, Google will be able to charge universities and others high prices for access to its database.

The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. “Google will be a monopoly.”

The question for Darnton and others, though, is: is this a bad thing? Google does not somehow become the exclusive copyright holder to orphan works. Other groups and companies are welcome to do the same thing and to also make money from it. And this particular monopoly is, contradictorily, limited and temporary. There will be well-funded competitors. There’s no indication that Google wishes to charge for access—it’s fair to assume Google will monetize the collection through targeted advertising as it does with search results and within Gmail. The original orphan works don’t disappear.

So I don’t begrudge Google its ambition. While experience shows that powerful groups try to control archives as a way of shaping history, experience also shows that seemingly dominant businesses, such as General Motors and Microsoft, are inevitably outflanked. And most important, as Schmidt explains in the Auletta interview, Google thrives only in so far as it is trusted. It’s a business that deals in user data, and that demands trust. Trust broken once is trust lost, so it’s in Google interest to welcome competing ideas, to accept criticism, and to be, above all, open.

One of the great things about my work at MIT is the preposterous level of encouragement the people there give each other. Example: even though I’m not a researcher, I get encouraged to post occasionally to the Center for Future Civic Media’s blog because I have a media background and am (nearly) equal in nerdiness to my formal researcher colleagues.

Since I’m in charge of making sure people post to our blog—which can be tough around Christmas—I’ll keep interviews in the hopper for use when posting is slow. Not only is that typical prudent editorial management, but it’s a really great way to approach people outside MIT that I admire.

Here’s a preview. Going up on the site sometime this week is an email interview I did with Michelle Springer, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the Library of Congress. Michelle was in charge of managing the Library of Congress’s partnership with Flickr. I asked Michelle to pick some favorite photos from the LoC’s Flickr photostream and to describe how they speak to what Flickr can do for the relationship between the public and a government institution:

The photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2178249475/ is a terrific example of the personal history and memories that these photos can evoke. The original caption was “Street in industrial town in Massachusetts.” Flickr members quickly identified the location, and the Library changed the title to Sylvia Sweets Tea Room, corner of School and Main streets, Brockton, Mass., both in the Flickr version and in the Prints and Photographs Online catalog. The Library also added a note to its own online catalog record for this picture (http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsac.1a33856) so that people are pointed to the constantly growing rich discussions out in Flickr.

The rest of the interview is great, so be sure to bookmark civic.mit.edu.

Update: the interview is now posted.

Problem: North Korea is test-firing long-range missiles that could reach the United States. The U.S. wants North Korea to stop firing missiles.

North Korea, however, has not attacked a nation and has not broken any treaties. There are no grounds for a military response. Thus, North Korea still develops its weapons and threatens its neighbors and the United States.

Solution: North Korea’s Taepodong-II missile has a range of 9,000 miles. That’s far. To make things worse, as of today, North Korea is here:

A bad location. Abutting South Korea. In the same cul-de-sac as Japan. A short trip to the U.S.

But need North Korea be in such a bad location?

Believe it or not, the answer is no. North Korea’s location—and threatening proximity to other countries—need not be . . .

. . . because North Korea, like other countries, can be made to move.

For example, look:

That’s in the 1600′s. There was a larger buffer between America and East Asia in those days. Many dragons’ worth of buffer.

Pretty safe.

Earlier than that, in this detailed Arab map of Asia, North Korea was very, very buffered . . .

See?

So forget sabre-rattling and diplomacy. The real solution is to move the country again. North Korea: no neighbors—no threat.

Though all the hype about the Internet is about its hurtling us into a beautiful, linked-arms future, a huge portion of tomorrow’s ‘net will in fact be the past. We’re turning into a world of archivists, given the declining cost of server space and the increased public access to (and understanding of) memory-preserving tools like blogs, digital cameras, and flash drives.

We’re not talking about your aunt’s online genealogy project anymore. We’re already in the age of archive.org and its live (recorded) music project; of librivox.org’s attempt to voice-record every literary text in the public domain; of the Hollywood Animation Archive; of Wikipedia; of Google Video; of Flickr; and, yes, of your aunt’s online genealogy project, which now features photographs of known relatives tied to a GoogleMaps mashup of their locations.

Literary magazines have an opportunity (and I would say obligation) to take part in this informal but massive project—to make available their archives. Two or three years ago, you could argue that most of the great literary writing was effectively lost; if you didn’t know what you were looking for nor the library at which to find it, you didn’t have a chance of finding lesser-known Mencken, early Paris Reviews, or a pointed letter to the editor by Reinhold Neibuhr.

But now we have all the necessary ingredients for an organized literary past: tools to grant us the access, and experienced editors to link the stray bits and provide context. The magazine AGNI already makes a point to publish rediscovered (and, often, retranslated) work online. All literary publications should follow that lead, into the past.

After the site was crippled by a rush of publicity, LibraryThing.com is up and slowly running, available for you to self-catalog your own book collection. I’m totally going to sacrifice a weekend of being social to add and tag my collection—it will at least give myself the illusion of control over my weakening shelves.

One cool feature? You can view book covers on your computer screen as if the books themselves were faced out on a shelf—certainly impossible in the real world for any but the most shelf-ed (or anti-literate) of people.

What I still want, though, is for publishers to package an eBook version of a book with the print version that you buy. Imagine not only LibraryThing but also an iTunes-type library that stores electronic, easily searchable versions of everything you read. The saddest thing about bookshelves is that over time the books on them become decorative. But if you were to run a search on, say, Google Desktop and Google Desktop had access to electronic versions of your library, you just re-animated your print collection and made print copies that much more valuable.