Brewster Kahle on Radio Free Culture

[rostasi]

Interview with the founder and digital librarian of The Internet Archive (archive.org)

excerpt:

Ken: One of the things I really love about the Internet Archive, and what I really admire about what you are doing, is the way that you’ve jumped over all the digital rights and copyright issues that still seem to snag and ruin almost every other conversation about archives and librarians. When did you figure out that copyright is the wrong framework for talking about these things?

Brewster: Copyright is just part of the arsenal that people have to try to stop things they don’t like. The key thing I learned by doing the Wayback Machine was people are, when people see the stuff up there they’re trying to figure out are they being taken advantage of? If they feel like they’re being taken advantage of, they’ll figure out some way to cause you trouble. Copyright is just one arrow in that quiver.

There are all sorts of different things you can do to try to tangle up an organization or somebody else that you think is doing you wrong. So the key thing is to try to stay such that you don’t piss people off. And so being respectful, I guess, is probably the biggest.

And one of the wonders is actually out of the music world. There was a tradition that was started by the Grateful Dead which was they allowed their fans to tape their concerts and trade their concert recordings. This has gone on years and years before and I had my cassettes back in the ‘70s from Grateful Dead concerts and you just sort of knew who the top Deadheads were by how big their collection was and how few generations they were from the master copies or whatever. And we had an intern working for The Internet Archive (that was in 2002) and he said “You know, tape trading still exists and it’s just moved on to the internet.” I said “Nooo” and he said “Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are lots of other bands that do it.” And so I said “Okay, well why don’t you offer them unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth forever for free?” So we went and he wrote to the eTree community which was sort of the group that administered tape traders and said we’d be up for hosting these materials, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, for free. And somebody from that community wrote back and said “We don’t believe you. It’s too big. But if you could do it, it would be our dream.” Which is a really good sign. So we said okay, well let’s try it. And we did it - it was a little different from tape-trading to go and hosting on a web site so let’s get somebody within the band or somebody within that community to say it’s okay.

And so it wasn’t in signed triplicate, which is what your lawyers would all say to do, it was somebody within the band or something saying it’s okay to host this on the archive.org. And if anytime you want to take it back down again, we’ll take it back down again. So we started getting 3 bands a day signing up with this and about 40 concert recordings being uploaded to archive.org and it’s been going on now for 10 years. We just crossed over 100,000 concert recordings and 5,000 bands have signed up. And these are fantastic. It’s everywhere from bands that are playing in real venues – some of them are signed artists and some of them aren’t. And it’s working.

So you take that whole period of time when there were all these lawsuits going and suing grandmothers and kids - just dreadful – and we’re finding that there’s a path through this. There are ways to make it so that everybody’s happy: the library, we’re happy with it, the fans are happy with it, the bands are happy with it. It seems to be all around working. And I think we just need to kind of walk through some of these doors, maybe a little slowly, saying what we’re trying to do, how we’re trying to do it. We’re not making a lot of money off of this stuff. In fact we’re making no money off of this stuff. And that was key to the Grateful Dead. And that seems to help get through things that might just be tangled up for years if we didn’t do it that way.