10 Rules for Radicals
Pretty soon, I got a call from the National Archives to discuss the "Amazon situation." When I said that this video was totally unavailable to the public, I had misspoke—anybody could go to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland and watch any of those 1,800 DVDs onsite. They'd also let you make a copy of a DVD, and they'd even furnish the blanks to make those copies—up to 6 copies per visit.
And, they had more than the 1,800 DVDs in question, they had over 3,000 DVDs onsite.
"You mean," I asked, "if I went out there often enough, I could copy all 3,000 of the DVDs and post them?"
"Absolutely. You bet, go for it."
Well, at 10 minutes per DVD, that's 30,000 minutes— 500 hours—more time than I could spend in College Park, but a perfect opportunity for crowd-sourcing and thus was born the International Amateur Scanning League.
I wrote to the National Archives chief of staff to give a courtesy heads-up that I was going to draft a bunch of volunteers to go out to College Park and systematically copy all their DVDs. Imagine my surprise when she wrote back and said David Ferriero thought this was such a great idea that he'd like to come to the initial meeting of volunteers and personally teach them how to rip DVDs.
Next thing we knew, we were in a meeting room at the Sunlight Foundation in the middle of a major blizzard, and the Archivist of the United States was teaching us how to rip video. We printed a bunch of red, white, and blue FedFlix return envelopes for people to send the DVDs as they finished, and created Public Domain Merit Badges for
