Code Swaraj
Some people think when you hire a law firm, you’re the client and you tell them what to do and they carry out your orders. That isn’t how it works. The lawyers, particularly the kind of experienced senior litigators I work with, know infinitely more about the law than I do. For the most part, their job is to tell me how it is.
The idea that you command your lawyers and they simply carry out orders is even less true in the world of pro bono legal representation. I am blessed that nine major law firms around the world have agreed to represent Public Resource on a pro bono basis. In 2015, they contributed $2.8 million in legal time, in 2016 it was over $1.8 million, and in 2017 it over $1 million. It would not be possible to fight the fights that we face without their help. I simply couldn’t afford it, and would have had to fold my cards and give up the fight.
Back To Work On Real Data, My “Bread Labor”
As November came to a close, I continued to work on my backlog from India. Most pressing was the Digital Library of India, which I had renamed the Public Library of India. The government still hadn’t put their version back online and Sanskrit scholars were sending me notes asking for additional materials. With the addition of 4,450 books from the Archeological Survey of India, we had pushed the total volumes online close to 400,000 books.
Also taking considerable time were the official gazettes of India. The national government gazette had been straightforward to mirror. Looking in the Public Library repository, I found several hundred old gazettes from before liberation, and those were also added to the collection. The tough part though, were the gazettes of the state governments and several large cities.
One example was the Odisha Gazette, the official publication of a state with 43 million people. I wrote a script that brought down 38,073 issues of the gazette as PDF files. But, after that script ran, I pulled up some of the files and noticed that they referenced a font for the language Oriya that was not embedded in the PDF file. That means all you see is gibberish because your computer is looking for that font installed on the system instead of embedded in the file.
After running a series of scripts, I determined that 35,705 of the files had this problem and I would have to embed the fonts before uploading them to the Internet Archive. But, the font that they assumed would be on your system is an obscure one that was produced years ago by an Indian research institute and after several days of looking around, I was unable to find it for sale or for download, so I shelved Odisha for the time being.
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