Thank Goodness for People Like Brewster Kahle

Yesterday he gave a talk at the Tech Policy class, mentioned here before, on wifi, the Internet Archive and the policy issues they face as they work on their projects. Those projects include making wifi access from 17 rooftop nodes around SF (I'm hoping Berkeley is next!!), scanning a million books, sending out roving bookmobiles where public domain books can be downloaded and printed on the spot in places like India, Egypt and Uganda, and archives of books, audio, moving images, broadcast, software, and the web. His goals for the archive are preservation and access. They've also given a copy of everything they are archiving to the Library in Alexandria, which to date is 100 terabytes. He also said he believes we have a "right to remember" and quoted Michael Lesk who has said that he is worried we will lose the 20th Century. (The 19th is small, and out of copyright, the 21st is digital so we can wait out the 170 years of copyright protection, but the 20th is both under copyright and analog.)

Some important societal questions he asked, for digital libraries:
• Should libraries take over running digital projects, after the researchers have finished and want to move on to their next research project (example: Cite Seer, which is a science citation index, doing things like making footnotes linkable in scientific papers and allowing reverse lookups to see where all the cites are that link to a particular paper, and was developed through NEC, and then UPenn continued it), and it needs to be maintained?

• Storage, for now isn't a problem but bandwidth may be the thing that holds us back from progressing on the internet. How do we manage to get more bandwidth and good transfer methods for people working with large files?

Policy issues the archive faces:
• Copyright regime that prevents them from saving some materials, or makes it very difficult. Example, with software, they might have to reverse engineer old code, just to save it (on 5.5" floppies, no less) and yet, this is prohibited under the DMCA. He is waiting to hear about an exemption request (speech) made to the Library of Congress at their hearings this past spring. (These requests are made every three years for things like research...).
• Get better spectrum for wifi - 2.4ghz sucks. It's a piece of the radio spectrum; above FM, and is used for home handsets and garage door openers. All the rest of the spectrum is privately owned or military.
• Would like to see a "copyright free zone" where, maybe in Hawaii, or the Presidio, for example, people could experiment with copyrighted artifacts, to learn, make art, and to do social experiments.
• Would like to see libraries be able to assert "pre-emptive archiving" so that if a company is going down, the data isn't lost. Example, when Disney shut down Infoseek.
• Would like to see a "safe harbor" for research data, so that companies and institutions don't have to destroy information to keep it out of lawyers hands for fear of a lawsuit. Example, companies that destroy email or access logs, that might be used for research, but are also subject to subpoena.
• IP address and access logs retention vs. privacy. In order to protect privacy, he would like to see logs purged after 30 days.

I find this last point frustrating. I know he is right, and yet, it also seems like some researcher, playing around with those logs, might discover a way to make the bandwidth or the relaying of information more efficient, or we might in future understand more about people in a sociological way. And yet, because the data is used now for destructive purposes, we have no choice but to destroy it to maintain people's privacy.

Posted by Mary Hodder at September 25, 2003 07:08 AM