Right to Information, Right to Knowledge: Remarks of Carl Malamud
HasGeek Geekup (Public Lectures By Visiting Geeks), NUMA Bengaluru, October 15, 2017
Well, thank you, Sam. Can you hear me? Good. This is a beautiful facility.
I want to thank NUMA for hosting us, and especially, HasGeek, for organizing this event. Sandhya Ramesh, especially, has done a wonderful job of coordinating things. Thank you, Pranesh, for that very nice introduction, and Srinivas and T.J., for your very instructive presentations. And, of course, Sam, for dragging me to India again.
It’s a great pleasure to be here.
So, I have a strange profession. I am a public printer.
You may have heard of private printers, right? They do novels, in Hollywood, and they publish things.
Public printing goes back many, many years. There was a public printer, named Ashoka. The Emperor, the dearly beloved, who took pillars, and edicts of government, and spread them throughout India. He did this so people would know the law, and the Dharma, that they knew that animals should be treated properly. That different religions should be properly tolerated.
In Rome, a couple hundred years before that, the people rebelled against their rulers, and said, “You have to write the laws down. You can’t simply make them up every time we go to court.” They took the 12 Tables of Roman law, and they inscribed them in bronze, and in wood, and they put them in every marketplace in the Roman Empire, so that people would know what their laws are.
That’s because public printing is something that belongs to all of us. It’s different than private printing, where you do something to make some money, and then, maybe 70 years later, or in this day and age, 150 years later, it enters the public domain. But public printing is stuff that we all own. And I’ve been doing this for 37 years in the United States, everything from cultural archives to the law.
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