These Google scans are also available in the HathiTrust [1], an organization built from the big academic libraries that participated in early book digitization efforts. The HathiTrust is better about letting the public read books that have actually fallen into the public domain. I have found many books that are "snippet view" only on Google Books but freely visible on HathiTrust.
If you are a student or researcher at one of the participating HathiTrust institutions, you can also get access to scans of books that are still in copyright.
The one advantage Google Books still has is that its search tools are much faster and sometimes better, so it can be useful to search for phrases or topics on Google Books and then jump over to HathiTrust to read specific books surfaced by the search.
HathiTrust is a fine example of a repository which is in theory useful but in practice all but useless.
Participation is limited to tertiary academic institutions, and possibly only four-year (rather than two-year) ones. This excludes local (city/county) libraries, as well as primary/secondary (grammar / middle / high school in the US) libraries.
Even public-domain records cannot be downloaded in whole, but rather can be saved one page at a time as PDFs. I'm pretty sure that those interested in more useful archival will and/or have created automated tools to do so, but HathiTrust remains the most notable point-of-access for such works, and the additional generation of conversion and republication further degrades the quality of original-publication formats. (It's less a problem for regenerated works from OCR'd or manually-converted documents, but those of course lose all the characteristics of original publication.)
And of course, many materials still under copyright are not accessible to the general public at all, no matter how obscure. I'd run into a case of this some months back trying to get a date attribution of an Alan Watts lecture which had been posted to HN:
Even with institutional login, HathiTrust does not show the full text online for this journal. It only permits searching and then showing the page numbers of the matches, which can be done without logging in.
But I think this journal does not contain the date.
Searching for "his religion" (with quotation marks) in volume 6 via HathiTrust shows a single match on page 11. Searching for the same text via the Google Books link from your other post shows the following entry among a list of what I assume are lectures:
> 919 Jesus: His Religion, Or The Religion About Him ... 10.00 7.00
The first number is some kind of index or serial number. The second number is the cassette cost and the third is the reel cost. You can see the column headings by searching for the number 900.
Searching for "Watts" in the same book via Google Books shows the title of page 11, "New Alan Watts Lectures".
Searching for the year numbers, the matches on that page seem to be for some text about the indexing of works in MMRI-1970, 1971 and 1972, rather than a publication year.
Watts, Alan. Myth and Religion : the Edited Transcripts. First edition. Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1996.
It contains "Jesus - His Religion, Or the Religion About Him", which appears to be a very slightly different title from the work that you are searching for.
> Dan Clancy, the Google engineering lead on the project who helped design the settlement, thinks that it was a particular brand of objector—not Google’s competitors but “sympathetic entities” you’d think would be in favor of it, like library enthusiasts, academic authors, and so on—that ultimately flipped the DOJ.
I was at Google in 2009 on a team adjacent to Dan Clancy when he was most excited about the Authors’ Guild negotiations to publish orphan works and create a portal to pay copyright holders who signed up, and I recall that one opponent that he was frustrated at was Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who filed a jealous amicus brief (https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yo...) complaining that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too. In my opinion Kahle was wrong; the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing which is what actually happened in the 15 year since then. Instead of one company selling out-of-print but in-copyright books, or multiple organizations, no one is allowed to sell them today.
Since then, of course, Brewster Kahle launched an e-library of copyrighted books without legal authorization anyway which will probably be the death of the current organization that runs the Internet Archive. Tragic all around.
I wish the contradiction you spotted was clear on their Wikipedia page. It demonstrates how far back IA's management troubles go, and how their clean image was maybe just an image.
For me, I became concerned when they fibbed about why the Internet Archive Credit Union was liquidated. IA alleged it was shut down due to onerous regulations, but the government said IA actually never lived up to their goal of allowing local, low-income folk to sign-up for their service. https://ncua.gov/newsroom/press-release/2016/internet-archiv...
The situation with IA is one thing, but the general negative attitude of libraries and archives to public access is something I've observed too, and it's depressing.
For instance, they can spend a lot of effort digitizing an archive they got from a business active from 1890 to 1970 - and then put it all in a single collection, which the public won't get access to until 2070. There's no reason to think the business handled sensitive personal information, but it's too much work to check, so they assume it did. They could classify individual documents according to whether they were actually from before 1920, but that's too much work too.
One thing to keep in mind is that libraries and archives have been budget starved for decades. You can often get a grant to acquire or digitize something but fewer donors are interested in paying lawyers to evaluate copyright exposure, which leads to conservative policies.
All of the actual librarians and archivists I know hate this situation - it’s not a job you take if you don’t want people to access things – but that tends to translate into requests for copyright exemptions.
A really big one is orphan works where they have things like digitized music which can’t even be linked to a known copyright holder because it’s unclear who owns it after decades of contract shuffles and acquisitions, where you could potentially solve the problem by changing copyright law to require periodic payments to maintain protected status so someone at, say, Sony would have to cut a check every year to say that they still want to protect some obscure old blues track from 1952 which they don’t even offer for sale any more. I especially liked the proposals linking that to availability for mainstream sale: say that there’s no charge for anything which is normally available on iTunes, Play, Amazon, etc. but you need to pay a fee for works which aren’t available.
That’s the case with so much of this sort of thing. You also see it in cases like open sourcing proprietary software. You need to pay someone competent to do a thorough audit or you end up with headlines about so and so releasing PII or otherwise confidential information.
This is an insightful comment and I thank you for sharing it but, after having looked at the brief you linked
> a jealous amicus brief that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too
that's not a fair overview of the amicus brief, there are good points there about the process of notifying orphan works rights holders and about the risk of a monopolistic position. I do agree with you on this part though
> the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing
Edit: I also agree with you that the way the IA subsequently created its e-library was not ideal.
> that's not a fair overview of the amicus brief, there are good points there about the process of notifying orphan works rights holders and about the risk of a monopolistic position
What I meant by “jealous” is that the Internet Archive’s interest was not to improve author notification or to protect foreign authors; it was to provide a competing service under similar or better terms than Google was able to negotiate without spending the time and money that Google did litigating. Kahle wanted what was in Google’s settlement.
And what I meant by “Kahle was wrong” is not that every argument that his lawyers thought up was false; I think the agreement was later amended to fix some issues. My point is that Kahle’s theory of change was wrong. He thought that when the settlement was rejected, then Google would push Congress to create an orphan works law which the Internet Archive could use to publish old books too. As he wrote in his op-ed, “We need to focus on legislation to address works that are caught in copyright limbo. … We are very close to having universal access to all knowledge. Let's not stumble now.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/0... As it turns out, the rejection of the class action settlement did not cause Congress to create an orphan works law. In retrospect, we would have been more likely to get an orphan works law if Google had been allowed to set up a proof of the concept, making the monopoly on orphan works temporary.
> In my opinion Kahle was wrong; the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing
Maybe. I think that is a pretty optimistic view of congress and our political process. I would argue that having a powerful, rich company with a monopoly to lose would have made passing such a law less likely, not more.
I do think we would have been better off with a Google monopoly on unpublished unclaimed books than with the lack of access we have today.
The article says:
> You’d get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you’d have to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You’d flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a few minutes for the command to propagate.
If it's so easy, I'm suprised nobody has done it and accepted the consequences. It seems one of the largest single positive impacts any person could make on the world. Once it's released, it'll never go back in the box. A modern Pandora.
In practice that is an obvious exaggeration for the purposes of making a point. It is probably simple enough to make the change, and it’s equally easy to change it back. One configuration makes you subject to massive lawsuits and the other doesn’t.
How would a settlement with the Authors' Guild cover orphan works? If the Authors' Guild is in a position to grant a license, then it's not an orphan work. The whole orphan works problem is that for a lot of valueless works, nobody knows who owns what.
Class actions can include people just by describing who makes up the class, that’s why the parties who worked on the proposed settlement came up with the plan. This method (uniquely) allowed settling with (essentially negotiating a deal with) all those unknown parties, a feat impossible otherwise.
The class as I understand it was the copyright holders of every book in a library, and if approved by the court they can all be legally said to have agreed to the settlement’s terms if they didn’t opt out. Now as with anything legal the whole thing depends on someone’s interpretation of whether it’s ok, but this was a plausible reading of Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
One could file a class action suit on behalf of everyone who ordered a strawberry shake at a McDonald’s in 2023, without ever knowing who or exactly how many they are, and if a judge certified it as a class action and McDonalds cut a deal with those representing the class, the terms would bind them all (except those who explicitly excluded themselves).
Fortunately (by some definition of fortunately), most countries don’t agree on exactly how the web should be “locked down.” This benefits at least some people (like me) who live in countries who make also no effort to restrict what can be shoved down the internet tube, including from countries that don’t particularly care about western copyright law. Would it be nice to have a fully sanctioned pandemic library-style service? Absolutely. But I have never once looked for a textbook, paper, regular book, etc online and not found a copy for free. Usually takes the same amount of time or less compared to finding a copy on Amazon (if it’s currently in print), and almost always less time using my library’s clunky online ebook platform[1].
Is that legal? Technically yes, in my country. Is it ethical? Debatable, depending on who you’re asking. But for me personally, I have found it to be getting substantially easier to find high quality copies of copyrighted anything in the past 3-5 years compared to 10-15 years ago, so I don’t necessarily agree with the blanket statement that “the net is only getting more locked down.”
[1] I like to use the library as much as possible, if for nothing else than to increase usage numbers to marginally positively decrease the likelihood of finding cuts.
Thanks for making me aware of this. This guy's heart is clearly (to me) in the right place, but his understanding of power is seriously lacking. That's probably what gave him the hubris to create Wayback and IA, but he'll be absolutely dumbstruck when they shut it down.
He won't be surprised at all. His slogan is "governments burn libraries". He's been able to forestall that for a while, and even provide public access, but permanence of the IA as an institution was never in the cards, given its subversive goal: universal access to all human knowledge.
Guess where the first backup copy of the Internet Archive is located.
I worked at the Library of Congress on their Digital Preservation Project, circa 2001-2003. The stated goal was to "digitize all of the Library's collections" and while most people think of books, I was in the Motion Picture Broadcast and Recorded Sound Division.
In our collection were Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, wire spool recordings from reporters at D-Day, and LPs of some of the greatest musicians of all time. And that was just our Division. Others - like American Heritage - had photos from the US Civil War and more.
Anyway, while the Rights information is one big, ugly tangled web, the other side is the hardware to read the formats. Much of the media is fragile and/or dangerous to use so you have to be exceptionally careful. Then you have to document all the settings you used because imagine that three months from now, you learn some filter you used was wrong or the hardware was misconfigured.. you need to go back and understand what was affected how.
Also.. it was fun learning the answer to "what is the work?"
If you have an LP or wire spool recording, the audio is the key, obvious work. But then you have the album cover, the spool case, and the physical condition of the media. Being able to see an album cover or read a reporter's notes/labeling is almost as important as the audio.
Is the Library of Congress really beholden to copyright laws? I guess I assumed as the national deposit library they had a special exemption to copy any damn thing they pleased for archival purposes.
If they don't have that prerogative, they probably should, and Congress should legislate that to be the case.
The Library of Congress and its staff determine fair use exceptions in certain contexts so I’m not sure who could find fault with them, as they could simply authorize it before or after the fact, from what I understand.
“Page had always wanted to digitize books. Way back in 1996, the student project that eventually became Google—a “crawler” that would ingest documents and rank them for relevance against a user’s query—was actually conceived as part of an effort “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library.” The idea was that in the future, once all books were digitized, you’d be able to map the citations among them, see which books got cited the most, and use that data to give better search results to library patrons. But books still lived mostly on paper. Page and his research partner, Sergey Brin, developed their popularity-contest-by-citation idea using pages from the World Wide Web.“
Larry Page had some cool ideas… can’t imagine Books will ever be resurrected, unfortunately.
He really wanted to digitize all of them to provide reference and training data for early language models (well before LLMs, transformers, etc).
He also had a plan (with George Church) to build enormous warehouses holding large-scale biology research infrastructure right next to google data centers. Because most biology research is done at locations that have reached their limit on computational/storage capacity.
Larry had many good ideas but he struggled to get the majority of them off the ground. For example, when Trump was president and invited all the major tech leaders, Larry came with a plan to upgrade the US electrical system with long-range DC.
>Larry came with a plan to upgrade the US electrical system with long-range DC.
I feel like some crucial detail is missing here. They already use HVDC for long-distance transmission lines, inside and outside of the US. Texas could benefit from it I suppose, but the US in general already uses it where appropriate AFAIK.
> Larry had many good ideas but he struggled to get the majority of them off the ground. For example, when Trump was president and invited all the major tech leaders, Larry came with a plan to upgrade the US electrical system with long-range DC.
I fail to see how that would be a good idea.
To me, it looks like some magnate in a completely unrelated industry, who is megalomaniac enough to believe that they can enter a completely unrelated industry and explain to experts how things ought to get done.
> The idea was that in the future, once all books were digitized, you’d be able to map the citations among them, see which books got cited the most, and use that data to give better search results to library patrons.
You can do something similar to this already, by mapping which books are cited in Wikipedia articles. If you know how to do such a thing, because I don't.
> Wikipedia is an essential component of the open science ecosystem, yet it is poorly integrated with academic open science initiatives. Wikipedia Citations is a project that focuses on extracting and releasing comprehensive datasets of citations from Wikipedia. A total of 29.3 million citations were extracted from English Wikipedia in May 2020. Following this one-off research project, we designed a reproducible pipeline that can process any given Wikipedia dump in the cloud-based settings. To demonstrate its usability, we extracted 40.6 million citations in February 2023 and 44.7 million citations in February 2024. Furthermore, we equipped the pipeline with an adapted Wikipedia citation template translation module to process multilingual Wikipedia articles in 15 European languages so that they are parsed and mapped into a generic structured citation template. This paper presents our open-source software pipeline to retrieve, classify, and disambiguate citations on demand from a given Wikipedia dump.
Prior work referenced in above abstract with some team overlap:
Wikipedia citations: A comprehensive data set of citations with identifiers extracted from English Wikipedia [2021]
It's somewhat ironic that, while the individual books are still accessible, their index pages https://www.oreilly.com/free and https://www.oreilly.com/openbook both redirect to some AI propaganda these days, with no links to the books left.
This seems to be the fate of knowledge/content that stays in institutions which have been built with the idea of collecting it and growing it.. but have turned into walled gardens/crypts of sort. Rot/Rust and be forgotten.
A very cynical and dark view is that the New things/people need that oblivion in order to feel great, for not haveing to compare with old great-er ones. Rewriting history as it seems fit the current powers-that-be, is easier this way.
Or may be it's just collective stupidity? or societal immaturity ?
(i am coming from completely different killed project on a different continent, but the idea is the same)
The books project was very early in Google's history. Possibly before their IPO. Since then, they've shed their don't be evil motto and shitcanned the 20% time affordance for new projects.
I think it's neatly summarized in two words: shareholder growth.
I think you are on to something, people frequently don’t want to grapple with and understand what has been done before, they prefer to just wing it and move forward on their own.
I seriously doubt there's very much highly relevant old knowledge locked away somewhere. Is there interesting stuff we don't have good access to? Sure, but mainly of interest to historians (pro or amateur). You're not likely to find the cure for cancer written down in some 1000-year-old book somewhere. And while a few people might really be interested in reading decades or centuries-old novels that weren't popular enough to be called "classics" now, the vast majority of people aren't going to find such stories about people in the distant past all that interesting.
Of course, it's best to preserve past knowledge, but I think the idea that this is part of some kind of conspiracy to keep people buying new stuff is pretty silly. People are always going to want new stuff, as society grows and changes.
> find the cure for cancer written down in some 1000-year-old book somewhere.
While you're most likely right about the cure for cancer, I did want to note that this is kind of how the cure for malaria was found (artemisinin). Tu Youyou who won the nobel prize systematically investigated Traditional Chinese Medecine remedies until she came across one that was effective. That particular remedy was described in a 1600 years old text The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments, written in 340 by Ge Hong.
Note: before anyone think that the fact that a remedy described in traditional Chinese texts mean that TCM is reliable and a viable alternative in all text, she screened over 2,000 traditional Chinese recipes and made 380 herbal extracts, from some 200 herbs which were tested on mice. So, yes one of the remedy were successful but the success rate of TCM was not particularly high :)
> I seriously doubt there's very much highly relevant old knowledge locked away somewhere.
Interesting take on what "knowledge" means and what makes knowledge valuable.
If I understand "knowledge" as "information directly relevant to a technical problem", then:
- the knowledge which remains relevant to that problem will stay available to practitioners (i.e. the properties of a Gaussian distribution, from Gauss, 1809)
- the knowledge which is no longer relevant to that problem will probably be lost (how to compute the integral of a Gaussian using a slide rule. Slide rules first developed circa 1620, last used circa 1970)
In other words, yes, your point is profoundly true. Knowledge relevant to a specific task stays available, not relevant gets pruned quickly.
My question would be if we want to use that definition of relevant and that understanding of what drives value. i.e. I'm not asking if you are correct, I've just shown that you are correct. My question is if the assumptions/values which make this correct are assumptions/values we are comfortable with. In other words, is is wise?
I am fairly certain there is more knowledge/content available to anyone in this century than last century or any century before it. But perhaps I have misread your comment.
With library genesis, who needs Google Books anymore? I buy books physically to support the author/s and download an epub version from said site to my kindle. The physical books I hardly read, they are for my shelf. Although I love the feeling of printed books, but I read in bed, and it‘s easier to hold an ebook. Also I read when I commute. It’s lighter to have my Kindle Oasis with me with tons of books on it.
Someone needs to scan the book and upload it to library genesis. The article said Google had developed this massively efficient apparatus for scanning (or taking photographs of) books, and most of the article was about out-of-print books.
I personally have actually tried to contribute to libgen a particular difficult-to-find-online book by buying it, scanning it, and uploading it. There need to be more people doing this.
There’s the everything available online for free mindset. But, yes, I’ve basically donated all my books that were in the public domain. And, in general, have been massively purging my book collection of stuff I won’t realistically read again.
Readit News
If you are a student or researcher at one of the participating HathiTrust institutions, you can also get access to scans of books that are still in copyright.
The one advantage Google Books still has is that its search tools are much faster and sometimes better, so it can be useful to search for phrases or topics on Google Books and then jump over to HathiTrust to read specific books surfaced by the search.
[1] https://www.hathitrust.org/
As in, the business of running a nuclear energy plant?
Participation is limited to tertiary academic institutions, and possibly only four-year (rather than two-year) ones. This excludes local (city/county) libraries, as well as primary/secondary (grammar / middle / high school in the US) libraries.
Even public-domain records cannot be downloaded in whole, but rather can be saved one page at a time as PDFs. I'm pretty sure that those interested in more useful archival will and/or have created automated tools to do so, but HathiTrust remains the most notable point-of-access for such works, and the additional generation of conversion and republication further degrades the quality of original-publication formats. (It's less a problem for regenerated works from OCR'd or manually-converted documents, but those of course lose all the characteristics of original publication.)
And of course, many materials still under copyright are not accessible to the general public at all, no matter how obscure. I'd run into a case of this some months back trying to get a date attribution of an Alan Watts lecture which had been posted to HN:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231047> (thread).
And my request still stands. Anyone with an academic affiliation who can check <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000678503> and see how it relates to this post (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230841>) would have my gratitude.
But I think this journal does not contain the date.
Searching for "his religion" (with quotation marks) in volume 6 via HathiTrust shows a single match on page 11. Searching for the same text via the Google Books link from your other post shows the following entry among a list of what I assume are lectures:
> 919 Jesus: His Religion, Or The Religion About Him ... 10.00 7.00
The first number is some kind of index or serial number. The second number is the cassette cost and the third is the reel cost. You can see the column headings by searching for the number 900.
Searching for "Watts" in the same book via Google Books shows the title of page 11, "New Alan Watts Lectures".
Searching for the year numbers, the matches on that page seem to be for some text about the indexing of works in MMRI-1970, 1971 and 1972, rather than a publication year.
Watts, Alan. Myth and Religion : the Edited Transcripts. First edition. Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1996.
It contains "Jesus - His Religion, Or the Religion About Him", which appears to be a very slightly different title from the work that you are searching for.
Dead Comment
I was at Google in 2009 on a team adjacent to Dan Clancy when he was most excited about the Authors’ Guild negotiations to publish orphan works and create a portal to pay copyright holders who signed up, and I recall that one opponent that he was frustrated at was Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who filed a jealous amicus brief (https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yo...) complaining that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too. In my opinion Kahle was wrong; the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing which is what actually happened in the 15 year since then. Instead of one company selling out-of-print but in-copyright books, or multiple organizations, no one is allowed to sell them today.
Since then, of course, Brewster Kahle launched an e-library of copyrighted books without legal authorization anyway which will probably be the death of the current organization that runs the Internet Archive. Tragic all around.
For me, I became concerned when they fibbed about why the Internet Archive Credit Union was liquidated. IA alleged it was shut down due to onerous regulations, but the government said IA actually never lived up to their goal of allowing local, low-income folk to sign-up for their service. https://ncua.gov/newsroom/press-release/2016/internet-archiv...
For instance, they can spend a lot of effort digitizing an archive they got from a business active from 1890 to 1970 - and then put it all in a single collection, which the public won't get access to until 2070. There's no reason to think the business handled sensitive personal information, but it's too much work to check, so they assume it did. They could classify individual documents according to whether they were actually from before 1920, but that's too much work too.
All of the actual librarians and archivists I know hate this situation - it’s not a job you take if you don’t want people to access things – but that tends to translate into requests for copyright exemptions.
A really big one is orphan works where they have things like digitized music which can’t even be linked to a known copyright holder because it’s unclear who owns it after decades of contract shuffles and acquisitions, where you could potentially solve the problem by changing copyright law to require periodic payments to maintain protected status so someone at, say, Sony would have to cut a check every year to say that they still want to protect some obscure old blues track from 1952 which they don’t even offer for sale any more. I especially liked the proposals linking that to availability for mainstream sale: say that there’s no charge for anything which is normally available on iTunes, Play, Amazon, etc. but you need to pay a fee for works which aren’t available.
> a jealous amicus brief that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too
that's not a fair overview of the amicus brief, there are good points there about the process of notifying orphan works rights holders and about the risk of a monopolistic position. I do agree with you on this part though
> the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing
Edit: I also agree with you that the way the IA subsequently created its e-library was not ideal.
What I meant by “jealous” is that the Internet Archive’s interest was not to improve author notification or to protect foreign authors; it was to provide a competing service under similar or better terms than Google was able to negotiate without spending the time and money that Google did litigating. Kahle wanted what was in Google’s settlement.
And what I meant by “Kahle was wrong” is not that every argument that his lawyers thought up was false; I think the agreement was later amended to fix some issues. My point is that Kahle’s theory of change was wrong. He thought that when the settlement was rejected, then Google would push Congress to create an orphan works law which the Internet Archive could use to publish old books too. As he wrote in his op-ed, “We need to focus on legislation to address works that are caught in copyright limbo. … We are very close to having universal access to all knowledge. Let's not stumble now.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/0... As it turns out, the rejection of the class action settlement did not cause Congress to create an orphan works law. In retrospect, we would have been more likely to get an orphan works law if Google had been allowed to set up a proof of the concept, making the monopoly on orphan works temporary.
Maybe. I think that is a pretty optimistic view of congress and our political process. I would argue that having a powerful, rich company with a monopoly to lose would have made passing such a law less likely, not more.
I do think we would have been better off with a Google monopoly on unpublished unclaimed books than with the lack of access we have today.
The article says:
> You’d get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you’d have to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You’d flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a few minutes for the command to propagate.
If it's so easy, I'm suprised nobody has done it and accepted the consequences. It seems one of the largest single positive impacts any person could make on the world. Once it's released, it'll never go back in the box. A modern Pandora.
The class as I understand it was the copyright holders of every book in a library, and if approved by the court they can all be legally said to have agreed to the settlement’s terms if they didn’t opt out. Now as with anything legal the whole thing depends on someone’s interpretation of whether it’s ok, but this was a plausible reading of Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
One could file a class action suit on behalf of everyone who ordered a strawberry shake at a McDonald’s in 2023, without ever knowing who or exactly how many they are, and if a judge certified it as a class action and McDonalds cut a deal with those representing the class, the terms would bind them all (except those who explicitly excluded themselves).
It will have consequences far beyond the immediate lawsuit too.
The very concept has basically been iced for a generation and the net is only getting more locked down not less.
Is that legal? Technically yes, in my country. Is it ethical? Debatable, depending on who you’re asking. But for me personally, I have found it to be getting substantially easier to find high quality copies of copyrighted anything in the past 3-5 years compared to 10-15 years ago, so I don’t necessarily agree with the blanket statement that “the net is only getting more locked down.”
[1] I like to use the library as much as possible, if for nothing else than to increase usage numbers to marginally positively decrease the likelihood of finding cuts.
Guess where the first backup copy of the Internet Archive is located.
I've used it to track down when wording on a site (for someday relevant to my job) changed, for example.
Dead Comment
In our collection were Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, wire spool recordings from reporters at D-Day, and LPs of some of the greatest musicians of all time. And that was just our Division. Others - like American Heritage - had photos from the US Civil War and more.
Anyway, while the Rights information is one big, ugly tangled web, the other side is the hardware to read the formats. Much of the media is fragile and/or dangerous to use so you have to be exceptionally careful. Then you have to document all the settings you used because imagine that three months from now, you learn some filter you used was wrong or the hardware was misconfigured.. you need to go back and understand what was affected how.
Cool space. I wish I'd worked there longer.
If you have an LP or wire spool recording, the audio is the key, obvious work. But then you have the album cover, the spool case, and the physical condition of the media. Being able to see an album cover or read a reporter's notes/labeling is almost as important as the audio.
Deleted Comment
If they don't have that prerogative, they probably should, and Congress should legislate that to be the case.
Larry Page had some cool ideas… can’t imagine Books will ever be resurrected, unfortunately.
He also had a plan (with George Church) to build enormous warehouses holding large-scale biology research infrastructure right next to google data centers. Because most biology research is done at locations that have reached their limit on computational/storage capacity.
Larry had many good ideas but he struggled to get the majority of them off the ground. For example, when Trump was president and invited all the major tech leaders, Larry came with a plan to upgrade the US electrical system with long-range DC.
I feel like some crucial detail is missing here. They already use HVDC for long-distance transmission lines, inside and outside of the US. Texas could benefit from it I suppose, but the US in general already uses it where appropriate AFAIK.
I fail to see how that would be a good idea.
To me, it looks like some magnate in a completely unrelated industry, who is megalomaniac enough to believe that they can enter a completely unrelated industry and explain to experts how things ought to get done.
You can do something similar to this already, by mapping which books are cited in Wikipedia articles. If you know how to do such a thing, because I don't.
https://aarontay.medium.com/3-new-tools-to-try-for-literatur...
https://archive.is/Ul13s
Specific to Wikipedia:
Wikipedia Citations: Reproducible Citation Extraction from Multilingual Wikipedia [2024]
https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19291v1
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.19291
> Wikipedia is an essential component of the open science ecosystem, yet it is poorly integrated with academic open science initiatives. Wikipedia Citations is a project that focuses on extracting and releasing comprehensive datasets of citations from Wikipedia. A total of 29.3 million citations were extracted from English Wikipedia in May 2020. Following this one-off research project, we designed a reproducible pipeline that can process any given Wikipedia dump in the cloud-based settings. To demonstrate its usability, we extracted 40.6 million citations in February 2023 and 44.7 million citations in February 2024. Furthermore, we equipped the pipeline with an adapted Wikipedia citation template translation module to process multilingual Wikipedia articles in 15 European languages so that they are parsed and mapped into a generic structured citation template. This paper presents our open-source software pipeline to retrieve, classify, and disambiguate citations on demand from a given Wikipedia dump.
Prior work referenced in above abstract with some team overlap:
Wikipedia citations: A comprehensive data set of citations with identifiers extracted from English Wikipedia [2021]
https://direct.mit.edu/qss/article/2/1/1/97565/Wikipedia-cit...
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00105
Datasets:
A Comprehensive Dataset of Classified Citations with Identifiers from English Wikipedia (2024)
https://zenodo.org/records/10782978
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10782978
A Comprehensive Dataset of Classified Citations with Identifiers from Multilingual Wikipedia (2024)
https://zenodo.org/records/11210434
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11210434
Code (MIT License):
https://github.com/albatros13/wikicite
https://github.com/albatros13/wikicite/tree/multilang
Bonus links:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2022/11/01/guest-post-wi...
They call it Founder's Copyright. The also use Creative Commons. The goal is to make out of print books available at no cost.
Exciting!
Follows link
Link no longer exists, gets O'Reilly front page instead
"Introducing the AI Academy, Help your entire org put GenAI to work"
Thanks O'Reilly.
The new dream of the internet: Some information, that aligns with the values of our advertisers, delivered via an LLM that sometimes makes shit up.
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/make3/book/
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A third party page still has links to some (possibly all) of the books: https://zapier.com/blog/free-oreilly-press-books/
A very cynical and dark view is that the New things/people need that oblivion in order to feel great, for not haveing to compare with old great-er ones. Rewriting history as it seems fit the current powers-that-be, is easier this way.
Or may be it's just collective stupidity? or societal immaturity ?
(i am coming from completely different killed project on a different continent, but the idea is the same)
I think it's neatly summarized in two words: shareholder growth.
Of course, it's best to preserve past knowledge, but I think the idea that this is part of some kind of conspiracy to keep people buying new stuff is pretty silly. People are always going to want new stuff, as society grows and changes.
While you're most likely right about the cure for cancer, I did want to note that this is kind of how the cure for malaria was found (artemisinin). Tu Youyou who won the nobel prize systematically investigated Traditional Chinese Medecine remedies until she came across one that was effective. That particular remedy was described in a 1600 years old text The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments, written in 340 by Ge Hong.
Note: before anyone think that the fact that a remedy described in traditional Chinese texts mean that TCM is reliable and a viable alternative in all text, she screened over 2,000 traditional Chinese recipes and made 380 herbal extracts, from some 200 herbs which were tested on mice. So, yes one of the remedy were successful but the success rate of TCM was not particularly high :)
Interesting take on what "knowledge" means and what makes knowledge valuable.
If I understand "knowledge" as "information directly relevant to a technical problem", then:
- the knowledge which remains relevant to that problem will stay available to practitioners (i.e. the properties of a Gaussian distribution, from Gauss, 1809)
- the knowledge which is no longer relevant to that problem will probably be lost (how to compute the integral of a Gaussian using a slide rule. Slide rules first developed circa 1620, last used circa 1970)
In other words, yes, your point is profoundly true. Knowledge relevant to a specific task stays available, not relevant gets pruned quickly.
My question would be if we want to use that definition of relevant and that understanding of what drives value. i.e. I'm not asking if you are correct, I've just shown that you are correct. My question is if the assumptions/values which make this correct are assumptions/values we are comfortable with. In other words, is is wise?
I personally have actually tried to contribute to libgen a particular difficult-to-find-online book by buying it, scanning it, and uploading it. There need to be more people doing this.
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