Code Swaraj
University of North Carolina Press wrote to us. They had a list of 35 books, and it was a very nice note, that said: “Look, we didn’t mind that you had our books online before. But we’re starting to put our backfile online, and sell it. So we’d rather that you didn’t have them.”
So we looked at their list, and then, we searched in our database, and found a few more books that they hadn’t found—wrote them a nice note, and said, “Here we are. If you have anymore problems, let us know.” In total, we took about 127 books off. Not a big deal.
Now, there was a guy in Russia, who found his father’s book on the Internet Archive, and he knew one of the professors that was involved in this Digital Library of India, and he freaked out. He was going to sue. He just got very, very angry, and in return, the professors that had started this project, all very senior people, freaked out as well, and they went to the government, and the government got all upset. And I started getting all these notes saying, “You must delete all the books. You must get rid of them.”
I was like, “No, we’re not going to do that,” and then they actually took their server down. So we now have the only copy of the Digital Library of India on the Internet. I’ve actually renamed it, because they were worried that it looked like we were somehow affiliated with them. I said, “Okay, fine. We are the Public Library of India.” So they removed their—first, they removed all the books, so you could search for the metadata, but you couldn’t get the book.
Then, they took that down, and there was this obscure notice saying, “Due to copyright violations, this is not available. Come back soon.” And then, the metadata became available again, and then, the server disappeared altogether, and the copyright notice came back. And now, it’s still gone. It’s just, it’s off the net.
And what I understand is happening is, a team of government officials has spread out to these 10 different libraries, these scanning centers, where they got the books—and they’re going through the list, one by one, and they’re deciding which ones will be available, and which ones will not. They told us that they will notify us which books should be available.
When they first freaked out, I went and looked at the system a little more. My initial feeling was that we wouldn’t remove anything, and I said, “No. We’re not removing one million views per month, 500,000 books. We’re just not going to do that.”
80
