This Little USB Holds 19,000 Indian Standards
First of all, I’m not sure I believe they’re the experts in what is copyright and what is not; and copyright’s not a binary thing, right. If you’re blind, I can make access to any book under an international treaty. Under the Indian Copyright Act, if it’s for educational purposes between a teacher and a pupil—That’s what the Delhi University case was all about. So it’s not a binary thing. I just don’t think it’s the government’s job to tell you what to read and what not to read, and certainly not their job to tell me which books to make available on the Internet.
[Anuj Srinivas] Correct. That’s true.
[Carl Malamud] Unless there’s some national security issue, or something of that sort; but if it’s simply, “We don’t like it.” It’s like, “I’m sorry. I don’t care.”
[Anuj Srinivas] Correct. Now, we’ve come across the situation where the IT Ministry has taken their library down, and yours is the only version that’s up.
[Carl Malamud] Yes, which is nuts, absolutely nuts. Instead of having this fight with the government, I’d much rather that we were making the database better, that I was working with them, that we were scanning more books. That we were doing what we do on our Hind Swaraj Collection, which is very, very high quality material. Can I tell you about that?
[Anuj Srinivas] Yeah, sure.
[Carl Malamud] The Hind Swaraj Collection started with the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, all 100 volumes, right. Available online, anybody can read them. You can download PDFs, you can download ebook. I found 129 All India radio broadcasts of Gandhi speaking, every couple of days during the last year of his life. You can walk through the last year of his life. For each of those, I took the relevant portion of the collected works, put it into HTML, so you can listen to him in Hindi or Gujarati. You can read the English translation. You can then click into the collected works and see the letters he wrote that day. What did he do the next day? What did he do the previous day?
We have the selected works of Nehru. Many of them were on a government server, but they were missing some volumes. I got those volumes, so we have the most complete version of that. The works of Amedkar, the collected works, were on the Maharashta state server, but they were missing the last six volumes. Again, most complete version.
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