Note on Code Swaraj
fight for liberation, and certainly all the source documents and the words of the founding fathers, should be available, particularly when the materials were developed using government funds.
Even the Sabarmati Ashram asserts copyright over the works of Gandhi-ji and imposes technical limitations on their use. I must admit the first thing I did when I received the PDF files for the Collected Works was to remove the security restrictions (so people could extract pages from within a volume) and the watermarks, which were on every page and I believe defaced the works.
I have sent a letter to the Ashram asking for unrestricted copies of the materials on the Gandhi Portal to add to our own Hind Swaraj collection, without watermarks and without technical restrictions on use, and I am hopeful to have this discussion with them and others in India who are the trustees of important historical materials. I do understand the reason for some of these limitations, which is a sincere and fervent desire to protect the integrity of the works and prevent them from being misused. But, I don’t think locking down these historical works will prevent misuse, they will only discourage legitimate use. I believe we will have this discussion many times over the next few years as we all work towards a common purpose.
5. A Photographic Record of India. The fifth area that I believe we should work in is providing a better photographic record of India. The photos we found on the Ministry of Information servers are low-resolution, yet even those are spectacular. There are numerous photographic archives locked away throughout India, in many cases with high-resolution scans just sitting behind paywalls. There are also astounding collections in locations such as the British Library.
I believe a worthwhile goal is to develop a database of high-resolution photographs, suitable for uses from print to web, and making that database available for use without restriction. This is not hard. The photographic record of the Ministry of Information, for example, could easily be made more readily available and there is no reason to restrict usage.
6. All India Radio. Sixth, I was astounded to find 129 speeches of Gandhi-ji speaking on All India Radio during the last year of his life. Surely, there is much more in the vaults of All India Radio. A few of those treasures have been released as commercial CDs of music or other materials. All India Radio was a key part of the government, and it seems that making those archives available for much broader use would be of great interest.
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