Timothy Leary’s Dead - Let’s digitize him
By Paul Biba
I’m old enough that this news item really resonates for me. From Boing Boing about the Timothy Leary archives:
Timothy Leary was a visionary. Realizing the importance of the events of the day, he tenaciously saved records of each phase of his life, capturing not only the budding psychedelic movement and its history, but years later, trumpeting the coming of the digital age of personal computers when this concept was still foreign to most.
His archival collection contains over 500,000 documents, including hundreds of letters from luminaries of all kinds (Allan Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Anton Wilson), documents from his Harvard research, Millbrook journals, IFIF documents, hundreds of hours of audio and video and thousands of photographs. This collection records not only his life, but the history of the entire psychedelic movement, and more.
Last week, at a huge reunion event in San Francisco, his estate announced their plans to digitize this collection and place it online as one of the first projects of its kind. Hosted by Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive, the site will eventually house the entire collection, and it will be completely searchable and indexed. Dr. Leary had this dream before most people even knew what the internet was, or how important it would become.
We invite you to visit help support the digitization, by donating to help move the project forward.
It’s an important part of our cultural history. I think I’ll send them a check.
February 26th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Thanks to Paul Biba for posting this note about the attempt to create a comprehensive digital archive for Timothy Leary. He was a controversial figure during his lifetime and I wonder if this archive will cause controversy. I am not talking about psychedelia but about something that causes even greater alterations to the mind: copyright law.
Some of the most interesting content might be barred from the online digital archive because of copyright restrictions. When a person composes a letter the text is automatically copyrighted by the creator. When a letter is mailed it may be owned physically by the recipient, but the text cannot be freely published in a book or online. Hence, a letter from, e. g., Aldous Huxley, or Robert Anton Wilson to Timothy Leary cannot be placed online unless the composer or the deceased’s estate gives a thumbs up.
An estate might assert the paramount importance of personal privacy to remove a letter from an online archive. Alternatively, an estate might wish to publish and profit from a collection of letters without competition from a freely accessible repository.
In the court case “Salinger v. Random House” an unauthorized biographer of the mysteriously hermitical novelist extensively used the unpublished letters of Salinger without his permission. Salinger sued and won based on the legal theory that he controlled the copyright on the letters that he composed.
Of course, maybe most of Leary’s correspondents will be happy to appear in his archive and will raise no objections. Also, I could be completely wrong since I have no legal training. Yet this is an issue that will come to the forefront as more of these online archives are established.