Code Swaraj
copy, and I put it online. I looked at it carefully. There’s some copyright issues in the database. They were sloppy, but the metadata’s bad. Titles are wrong. The scanning was a little sloppy. Not only just skewed pages; but missed pages, or half a book is gone, or they screwed up the resolution.
We made a copy and we put it online in the intent just to make it better. Put it on the Internet archive. A million views a month we were getting on this thing. It became more visible. We got a few take down notices. That happens in the big leagues. You get take down notices, and you respond to them. You say, “Okay, fine. I’ll remove it.”
[Anuj Srinivas] In certain cases, you’re happy to comply with them.
[Carl Malamud] Oh, absolutely. If someone says the book is copyrighted, it’s not a problem. We’ll remove it immediately. No big deal. When you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands, or millions of books like Brewster Kahle has on the Internet Archive, you get those. Mistakes happen.
The government freaked out, because it became more visible and they got a couple of notices from people saying, “Oh my God, you’ve got my book.” They took the entire database down. They asked us to take the entire database down. I said, “No. No, we’re not going to do that.” They said, “Well, take down everything from 1900 on.”
[Anuj Srinivas] What kind of books are part of this collection?
[Carl Malamud] It’s an amazing collection. 50 different languages. About half are in romance languages, English, German, French. Historical books, non-fiction, Gazette of India. All sorts of gazettes for different states, 50,000 books in Sanskrit. Books in, 30,000 in Gujarati. I’m not sure of these numbers, but it’s in the tens of thousands. Tens of thousands in Punjabi. Books in Tibetan. Books going back a thousand years. Just this amazing, unique collection that’s unavailable anyplace else in the world. I’m getting notes from India scholars from all over the world, saying “Oh my God, this is great!”
We make it available in a different way. You can navigate much more easily. People can very quickly send us notices and say, “Oh, you’ve got the metadata wrong,” and we’re able to fix it. We’re trying to make it better. The government said, “No, no, no. You have to take it offline, and we will tell you which books are okay, because we are going to examine them one by one and decide which are copyrighted and which are not. ”
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