Right there in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle, within maybe 30-40 miles of John Edwards' Presidential campaign headquarters, is a hotbed of public-domain activity. It's the University of North Carolina's virtual ibiblio library, whose servers help house Project Gutenberg's 10,000 e-books. And that's not all. Within ibiblio, to quote a Wired News item, sharing isn't a dirty word, and you can "listen to some classic Southern folk music, hear a Nobel Prize-winning poet read his work, learn how to upload your mind, tend bees, speak Japanese or heal with herbs. Or you might just want to download some free software."

"Making the invisible visible is what ibiblio does best," said ibiblio director Paul Jones.

Ibiblio's staff and contributors rescue documents, videos, audio and image files from dusty archives or attics where few could view them and put them on the Web, where anyone with an Internet connection can retrieve the information...

"We'd like to demonstrate that the best way to protect and preserve so-called intellectual property is to share it freely with everyone," said Jones. "Shared information is enhanced and improved, so its value can only increase. Hoarded knowledge just stagnates."

Ordinary readers and libraries are suffering mightily from a lack of an open-standards Universal Consumer Format for electronic books. This means, of course, an expensive and inconvenient Tower of eBabel--with the need for readers to clutter up their machines with different e-book programs and for librarians to cope with this mess. Quite accurately I said the Proprietary Format Promoters' Forum was dominated by Adobe, Palm, Microsoft and OverDrive. That's the key word--dominated.

At the same time, I do want to acknowledge the inclusion of some librarians on various technical committees of the Open eBook Forum. Problem is, the big commercial interests are prevailing, and the ALA has yet to make this the major issue that it should. If you want an idea of the specifics, check out an informative post in the Digital Librarian Web log written by Jeremy Frumkin, a metadata librarian at the University of Arizona and also chair of the Metadata and Identifiers Working Group of the OeBF. Here's a paragraph, in his response to my post, that I found of great interest:

The Rights and Rules Working Group (RRWG) is perhaps where much of Rothman's attention should be focused. The RRWG is where I believe the OeBF has moved away from being an Open Standards body and where it is now mainly focused on being a commercial interest organization. The RRWG recommended (and the OeBF membership approved) of XrML as the rights expression language for any DRM system associated with eBooks. Without going down the path of examining DRM itself as a concept, I have a difficult time with this choice. There are numerous patents surrounding XrML, and the company which holds these patents (ContentGuard), while being required to conform to Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND) licensing, has not come clean with exactly how it plans to enforce its patents around DRM systems which can utilize XrML. Also, if any technology which utilizes XrML needs to purchase a license from ContentGuard (or any other company), then it also means that there can be no legal open source implementations of DRM systems (at least DRM systems which handle eBooks).

"Jack Valenti, Hollywood's voice in Washington for nearly 38 years, most likely will step down in early January as chief of the Motion Picture Assn. of America while retaining the chairman's title and continuing to oversee the movie ratings system he fathered, sources said Thursday." - LA Times, via J.D. Lasica.

The TeleRead take: So does this mean that Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin of Louisiana, whom the Times portrays as the most likely replacement, will avoid discussing copyright matters with colleagues or otherwise influencing related legislation? I doubt it. Meanwhile J.D. writes:

Just finished a lengthy interview with Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America. An interesting, eloquent and extremely likable man.

...to come to those who, by their own ability and not through fortune, have risen to be princes, I say that Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and such like are the most excellent examples. And although one may not discuss Moses, he having been a mere executor of the will of God, yet he ought to be admired, if only for that favour which made him worthy to speak with God. But in considering Cyrus and others who have acquired or founded kingdoms, all will be found admirable; and if their particular deeds and conduct shall be considered, they will not be found inferior to those of Moses, although he had so great a preceptor...

A copy of the October 2002 Vanity Fair should be in the stacks. That's what the gray-haired librarian in the pink sweater said with a slight drawl, there at the red-brick main branch in Alexandria, Virginia.

Perhaps between the paragraphs on Stephen Bing’s affair with Liz Hurley, I could actually get a sense of how the multimillionaire producer might feel about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I doubted I’d see anything relevantly explicit, but the hints might be there. Would Bing have the brains and the guts to take a stand? That should count. Stephen Bing is, after all, one of the biggest contributors to the Democratic National Committee and has given more than $900K to presidential candidate John Edwards. I thought: “If I can educate Bing about the threat that the Bono and DMCA acts pose to the poor and the Third World—familiar causes to him—perhaps John Edwards and Howard Dean and the rest will follow.”

As is often the case, the physical incarnation of the Alexandria library lacked the information I needed. The October issue was missing—just one more argument for TeleRead, under which major magazines like Vanity Fair could be online in full for library users throughout the country, regardless of the wealth or poverty of a library district. Nothing more than an abstract of the Bing article, alas, existed in Alexandria’s online database. While Alexandria is not Beverly Hills, it isn’t a cash-strapped rural library system, either. Besides, however rich or poor a library is, a well-integrated approach such as TeleRead would make it just plain more convenient to find nicely researched articles from a number of sources. Keep in mind that millions of American children rely on the Net for homework and often settle for third-rate Web sites.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” I told Ms. Pink Sweater with TeleRead in mind, “if all this were on the Net so everyone could find what good stuff without any fuss.”

“Well,” she said, “someone’s got to make a buck.”

“Of course,” I said, “and they could be paid fairly just as they are for paper copies. Look, why don’t you call the Fairfax system?”

The Fairfax County library aide who helped me conquer a finicky Xerox machine was a tall, lanky man with a young face, perhaps in his late teens or early 20s, and I tried out on him the same TeleReaderish what-if that I had with the gray-haired librarian. In a nanosecond he said, “Exactly.” Digital libraries all too often are an Age Thing and will be for a long time, until the older librarians retire or die. Later my friend Jon Noring would quote to me a cruel but true line, from either Niels Bohr or Max Plancke, that explains how new scientific theories gain acceptance: “Science advances one funeral at a time.” The same applies, of course, to both copyright law and libraries. Bing himself is in his late 30s; still young enough? No ageism, however. With the right ‘tude, you can even be 100 and understand. Alas, however, even many young librarians don’t; for the profession tends to attract people of the "that’s the way it is" variety, as opposed to the "should be" types. At the same time, regardless of their budget challenges, librarians are not fixated on the next quarter, the way so many publishers are—and thus are far more trustworthy as archivists and allies of the school system.

Via my Xeroxing at the George Mason Regional branch, I just may not have pleased Jack Valenti, the millionaire lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, a durable Washington relic in his 80s. I had benefited from fair use, an old doctrine that I hope we’ll never bury. For free I’d made an individual library copy. Under the DMCA, readers could risk nasty penalties for “cracking” of “protected” digital documents—even for the purposes of democratic debate of the precise kind in which I was engaging. Actually Valenti may not have minded the paper copy, but an electronic version made through circumvention might be a different issue. At any rate, if DMCAism prevails, the rich will be more powerful than ever. What counts in the end won’t be the digital divide but the information and enlightenment divide, and potentially the DMCA is the equivalent of a thousand Grand Canyons.

So did the Vanity Fair article give me an idea of what Steve Bing is about? Absolutely. I was glad I had insisted on reading a professionally reported article, at full length, as opposed to less complete alternatives on the Web or perhaps in my $100-a-year database. I did see a little hope. To Vanity Fair, one of Bing’s friends recalled knowing him as a teenager and not learning “for a few years that he was not the poor struggling writer.” Here, with an advanced apology to Jack Valenti and friends for my future fair-use-related circumventions in a more digitized era, are a two paragraphs from Vicky Ward, the author of the Vanity Fair article:

Bing and his sister, Mary, now a 35-year-old married social worker in Queens, grew up knowing they had money, but not what or where it could get them. The family always flew coach and drove around in beat-up station wagons. Their father, Peter Bing, was a doctor who worked for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in public health. Their mother, Helen, is a former nurse with a long gray braid.

When Steve was three, his father moved the family from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles and embarked on full-time philanthropic work. Quietly. The one thing that go drilled into the Bing children was: Whatever you do, do it modestly and not for self-aggrandizement.

Many readers don't even think of e-books as real books--but rather as ephemeral Best Buy- or Circuit City-style merchandise, not that much different from Britney Spears CDs. Forget that digital books exist just as bits and bites. There's also the Tower of eBabel, along with the accompanying threat of format-related obsolescence. Ideally the industry will get serious about a Universal Consumer Format, and even then we'll still need an arrangement through which commercial publishers would systematically cooperate with libraries to guarantee the eternal accessibility of the material.

No, I don't just mean limited-access archiving, but rather a formal promise to individual readers in the vein of: "With evidence of the purchase of this e-book, you will always be able to obtain a replacement copy in a current format by going to such-and-such electronic address at the Library of Congress"--or another major institution. You've heard of legislation to guarantee the purity of food, laws that reputable corporations want. Well, we also need meaningful legal measures to encourage the consumer-level preservation of knowledge and culture in the electronic era. Forget about DMCA-style malarkey and the prohibition against cracking for format conversation purposes; the law is the thinking of lobbyists and Hollywood-bought politicians. Consumers don't want to have to buy a book over and over again in different formats as technology marches on, and sooner or later Net-hip voters will replace the old-coot pols who tolerate DMCAism--and then we can look forward to the EBPA: the Electronic Book Preservation Act.

In a blog item yesterday, Dorothea Salo eloquently defends the library model in terms of social justice but also warns of the format nightmare that future generations will live out if the quick-buckers in the e-pubishing industry get their way--and I believe that her wisdom would apply to my two paragraph above:

If digitization is left purely to profit-takers, poorer libraries and poorer patrons may be shut away from the best sources, and many useful materials will never be digitized owing to specialized or niche appeal. If digitization is left to publishers, my experience suggests that it will be done stupidly when it is done at all, and any benefits thereto will drown in a swamp of DRM and encryption schemes. If digitization is left to technologists, long-term usability of the data store may give way to chasing the latest gadgetry and formats. (Though I am admittedly traducing a good many technologists who are intimately familiar with data obsolescence.)

Washington's dubious gift to the Internet, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, has hit a North Carolina firm via a suit filed by Lexmark. The printer giant accused the Sanford-based Static Control Components of violating the anti-circumvention provision while picking up 56 bytes of computer code for a chip allowing remanufactured cartridges to work. The U.S. Copyright Office ruled on the case ambiguously, with both sides saying they had won. Old news. But today's Washington Post tells the story in plain language even if certain details are jumbled. Yes, this is the same DMCA that has wreaked havoc on e-book users by encouraging the use of cumbersome and inept copy-protection schemes that rely more on Draconian law than on the most deft programming and business planning. The DMCA is even harming the First Amendment. It encourages Internet providers to take down the sites of alleged copyright infringers immediately just to satisfy certain corporate executives, Hollywood and other special interests in the area of intellectual property.

Can N.C. Sen. John Edwards, a textile worker's son, rise above the other major Democratic Presidential candidates and side in the copyright battles with small businesses and consumers against pro-DMCA moguls, defenders of the notorious Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and other fatcats who swayed Congress through high-priced lobbyists and massive campaign gifts? If he and other stay mute on the DMCA, the public may shell out billions more for products ranging from replacement laser cartridges to--if some are right--even automobile tires. The DMCA was passed with the entertainment and publishing industries mainly in mind, but much damage has been done elsewhere, as the Static Controls case shows.

In fueling his campaign with money from Hollywood moguls and other members of the copyright elite, Sen. Edwards is merely representative of scads of national politicians, especially my fellow Democrats. From afar I actually like the guy. He and his wife, Elizabeth, have engaged in many good works, and I especially applaud their interest in education--it transcends politics, and I'd hope I could expect more of him than of the typical candidate.

Still, the issue of Sen. Edwards' massive donations from copyright industries is unavoidable. During the 2002 election cycle, more than a million dollars in copyright-related money reached an Edwards-linked Political Action Committee called New American Optimists (the actual home page of which was offline when I looked for it just now). The PAC received more than $900,000 from a Hollywood producer named Stephen Bing (Shangri-La Entertainment) and thousands more from other Hollywood types to augment Edwards' considerable take from fellow trial lawyers.

With all the entertainment-industry cash showered on the Edwards-promoting PAC, the conflict of interest potential is huge. Edwards serves on the Judiciary Committee, which, among other things, deals with copyright law along with patents and trademarks. Copyright law is a major issue for the film industry. The longer copyright terms last, the more money Hollywood believes it can make--even if it's at the expense of schools, libraries and the public at large. What's more, the multimillionaire ex-trial lawyer serves on a subcommittee on anti-trust, competition policy and consumer rights--all issues where the DMCA's critics have raised red flags in a Hollywood-related intellectual property context and otherwise. Logically, someone with Edwards' legal talents and much-touted interest in ordinary people should be enraged. And yet despite his elaborate Web site bidding for the votes of Internet users, he has refused to speak out against the DMCA and the Bono Act even though they are clearly against the interests of most voters in the Carolinas and elsewhere.

The DMCA alone could cost consumers billions, as noted, by make it easier for the Lexmarks of this cosmos to engage in anti-competitive practices against companies with equivalent products. While I appreciate Sen. Edwards' tolerance of Open Source software, that alone won't cut it. Victims of consumer-hostile copyright law such as the DMCA and Bono Act range from Static Control CEO Ed Swartz to schoolchildren deprived of free access to The Great Gatsby, perhaps the most American of novels, which, thanks to the latter law, won't enter the public domain for many years. Sen. Edwards can indulge in all the rhetoric he wants about protecting innovation, but the DMCA and the Bono Act are hated by many thousands of people in high tech--an industry far, far more important to North Carolina's prosperity than Hollywood-style entertainment. Simply put, bought copyright laws are bad news for hard-working Americans in the Carolinas and elsewhere, the very people for whom Edwards supposedly is watching out.

Meanwhile the Washington Post carries some ominous predictions from Swartz, whose corporation, by the way, is just an easy drive from Sen. Edwards' Raleigh campaign headquarters:

Should his company lose in court, Swartz envisions a world of monopolies that would make turn-of-the-century Standard Oil blush. He predicts deals between automakers and tiremakers, for instance, that would put copyright-protected chips in tires to prevent a car from starting unless it was fitted with automaker-approved tires. Imagine, for instance, if Toyotas would run only on Goodyear tires, he said. What would become of Michelin, Cooper, Pirelli and other tiremakers?

A federal judge in Massachusetts has granted a preliminary injunction against a consulting firm that allegedly violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when performing maintenance on StorageTek tape backup systems.

U.S. District Judge Rya Zobel ruled that Storage Technology, better known as StoreageTek, is likely to prevail in its lawsuit against a consultancy named Custom Hardware Engineering and Consulting, saying the controversial 1998 copyright law was violated when Custom Hardware effectively tricked a tape backup unit into believing that its technicians were granted full access to the system's internals.

StorageTek "is likely to succeed on the merits of all three of the claims asserted in support of the motion for a preliminary injunction," Zobel said in a ruling July 2. The other two arguments the company raised were copyright infringement and trade secret violations.

The StorageTek case is one of a series of lawsuits that are testing the boundaries of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Congress enacted in response to growing fears about Internet piracy. Section 1201 of the DMCA says that in general, nobody may "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access" to a copyrighted work...

Pliable. That's how most librarians are. So far they've seemed reconciled to expensive proprietary standards--threats to reliable archiving--rather than insisting on format standardization. Sure we hear some pro-standards rhetoric. But come buying time, the tune is different; and so the Tower of eBabel grows taller. In a very much related vein, I'll reproduce below the latest from the Proprietary Format Promoters' Forum dominated by Microsoft, Adobe and PalmDigitalMedia. If librarians feel compelled to go to the March 16 conference ballyhooed in the news release, they should raise hell and look beyond the comforting cliches that the Forum uses in its PR campaign. They should demand that library-oriented distributors get serious about the use of a Universal Consumer Format.

Looking to Checkout a Good eBook? Try your Public Library - "eBooks in the Public Library Conference" to Examine Growing Digital Book Adoption in Libraries

New York, NY (November 12, 2003) – Driven by complementary market forces, book publishers, technologist and librarians have found themselves united by the eBook. While publishers and technologists have been anxious to promote widespread adoption of electronic reading, public libraries have been battling sweeping budget cuts. Bring these communities together and a culture-shifting market opportunity emerges: over 16,000 U.S. public libraries lending eBooks to their communities 24-hours a day, 7 days a week.

To address the challenges and opportunities that eBooks pose for libraries, publishers and technologists, the Open eBook Forum, the electronic publishing industry’s trade association, will conduct the “eBooks in the Public Library Conference”, a day-long event scheduled for Tuesday, March 16th, 2004 in New York City.

“eBooks expand the role of the public library as the center of information distribution to our community and provide unparalleled access to new and important books,” said Patricia Lowrey, Head of Technical Services at Cleveland Public Library. “Today’s eBook formats and services offer our readers instant access to best selling titles, anytime, anywhere. The adoption of eBooks is a natural progression for the public library, building upon the growing reliance we’ve already seen for the services provided through our Web site.”

The conference will take place on Tuesday, March 16th, 2004 at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, 2nd Floor, New York, NY.

Further details about the conference including agenda, registration and sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities can be found at www.openebook.org/library2004.

Event sponsors include Adobe Systems, Inc., American Library Association, Baker & Taylor, Greenwood Publishing Group and OverDrive, Inc.

The program Advisory Committee includes eBook industry leaders: Karen Coyle, Library Consultant; Patricia Lowrey, Cleveland Public Library; Judy Luther, Informed Strategies; Tom Peters, TAP Information Services; Susan Peterson, Baker & Taylor; Steve Potash, OverDrive, Inc.; Tom Prehn, Adobe Systems, Inc.; and Rick Weingarten of the American Library Association.

For more information, please contact John Roderick, 631.689.3038, john@jroderick.com.

About the Open eBook Forum:

The Open eBook Forum, www.openebook.org, is an international non-profit trade and standards organization for the electronic publishing industry. The organization is supported by membership dues and the generous support of Adobe Systems, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, OverDrive, Inc. and Palm Digital Media.

An OeBF member list and membership information can be found on the OeBF Web site at www.openebook.org.

That's reportedly the vision of Clifford Lynch, as described by Alexander Campbell Halavais who summed up some highlights of the Publishing the Future Symposium.

Later, Clifford Lynch asked us to imagine a world in which the graduating senior left school with an iPod on her hip filled with a general library of their field. I find this a very compelling vision.

Why is it that students can have 40 gigs of music on their hip, but not 40 gigs of academic articles and books? The answer is easy enough: music traders challenged the music industry by ignoring their interpretation of copyright. (Some would phrase this differently: they stole it.) Once Napster exploded, the genie had left the bottle. Shutting down Napster and suing 12-year-olds was not going to stop it.

Wired News has a tidbit about the 333-foot George Washington Masonic Memorial just a few miles from me in Alexandria, VA, across the Potomac River from Washington. No direct e-book angle, but I couldn't resist blogging this one. Perhaps fodder for some thriller novelist, or a sci-fi writer into time travel or cloning or implanted memories--with GW Himself potentially involved?

Intelligence on another side of Washington can be studied in depth at the George Washington Masonic Memorial, in Alexandria, Virginia. The 333-foot memorial stands on Shooter's Hill, overlooking the nation's capitol.

Visitors to the memorial can view a fine collection of Washington memorabilia, much of it connected to George Washington's military career, as well as his deep involvement with the Masons. Washington was the charter master of Alexandria Lodge No. 22.

But the highlight of the memorial is the tour, guided by Mason Jim Williams, through the floors of meticulously constructed and decorated lodge rooms, including the Egyptian and Sumerian temples in the Cryptic and Royal Arch rooms, as well as the cathedral designed and dedicated by the Knights Templar.

"People come here believing the darnedest things about Masons," said Williams. "We aren't a cult, we aren't a religion, and we don't sacrifice infants or defile virgins. We're a fraternal organization dedicated to being the best people we can be."

A basic premise of TeleRead is that the bookstore model shouldn't be allowed to crush the Carnegie model. We need both--since the usual markets don't always save the day. In a similar vein, here's a scary example from medicine--about a promising new approach to unclogging arteries:

For some time now, pharmaceutical companies have been trying to develop pills that might stimulate the body to produce its own HDL cholesterol, thus far with no great success. An alternative approach, infusing HDL cholesterol directly into the body, was shown effective in animals more than a decade ago, but the industry never really pursued it. One reason was that companies saw little economic incentive in using a normal body protein for therapeutic purposes, since it would be hard to gain patent protection. A medicine that could be made and sold by anybody had little potential for profit. That problem was circumvented in this case by using a mutant form of protein discovered among some 40-plus inhabitants of a small Italian village. That made the drug unique, and patentable.

In theory, America's great web of government-financed medical research institutions should step in to promote development of the kinds of drugs and therapy that industry regards as unprofitable. This story makes one wonder how many similar gaps exist in the vaunted American research establishment.

Microsoft actually cares more about DRM than about e-books. It's baffling why Amazon and the rest would bother with the Microsoft Reader format, except for Microsoft's importance and maybe the paranoia of some powerful copyright zealots in publishing.

Not all human readers will have difficulty, but here's the latest horror story, from an Amazon customer, James J. O'Donnell, Georgetown University provost, who shared it with Dave Farber's Interesting People list:

Dave, a comical experience. I tried to buy some e-books from Amazon that require the use of Microsoft Reader to access them. The following steps occurred:

--Order, pay for books.

--Get instructions how to download.

--Following instructions, get interposed page that says that I must download, install, and activate Reader first and that this requires me to use Passport. I had an activated copy of Reader on the machine in question, but I went through the whole rigamarole, twice.

--Continue to get unable-to-download messages

--Wrangle Amazon support through several frustrating cycles (the kind of tech support that doesn't listen to what you say, so they tell you repeatedly to do what you've already told them repeatedly you've done).

--So finally the guy says, well you may be accessing the net through a firewall or a proxy server--you have to turn all that off.

Well, that didn't work either, and after complaining for days, Amazon finally refunded my money (all of $18). But what I thought funny and instructive is that in order to protect Microsoft's intellectual property, which it is against the law for me to do anything to undermine, disable, reverse engineer, they require me voluntarily to disable the security devices on my system (including any firewall designed to protect me against damage arising out of weaknesses in Microsoft operating systems).

An enticing and sensible proposal--unlikely, alas, to win over today's Hollywood-bought politicians--comes from Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Excerpt:

The institution of copyrights has its origins in the feudal guild system. Copyrights provide an incentive for creative or artistic work by providing a state-enforced monopoly. Like any other monopoly, this system leads to enormous inefficiencies, and creates substantial enforcement problems. The size of these inefficiencies and the extent of the enforcement problems have increased dramatically in the Internet Age, as digital technology allows for the costless reproduction of written material, and recorded music and video material.

The artistic freedom voucher (AFV) is an alternative mechanism for supporting creative and artistic work. It is designed to maximize the extent of individual choice, while taking full advantage of the potential created by new technology.

The AFV would allow each individual to contribute a refundable tax credit of approximately $100 to a creative worker of their choice, or to an intermediary who passes funds along to creative workers. Recipients of the AFV (creative workers and intermediaries) would be required to register with the government in the same way that religious or charitable organizations must now register for tax-exempt status. This registration is only for the purpose of preventing fraud - it does not involve any evaluation of the quality of the work being produced.

In exchange for receiving AFV support, creative workers would be ineligible for copyright protection for a significant period of time (e.g. five years). Copyrights and the AFV are alternative ways in which the government supports creative workers. Creative workers are entitled to be compensated once for their work, not twice. The AFV would not affect a creative worker's ability to receive money for concerts or other live performances.

The AFV would create a vast amount of uncopyrighted material. A $100 per adult voucher would be sufficient to pay 500,000 writers, musicians, singers, actors, or other creative workers $40,000 a year. All of the material produced by these workers would be placed in the public domain where it could be freely reproduced.