Remarks of Carl Malamud
They said, “Okay, remove everything after 1900.” And that would have left us with 60,000 books. I said, “Why 1900?” They just made up the date. And so, at first, I said, “Okay, fine. I’ll remove everything after 1923,” and that left me with 200,000 books.
I then went through the remaining 250,000 books that I had, and I looked carefully at that list. Many of them were Official Gazettes. Or they were the works of Mahatma Gandhi, which we know does not have copyright. Or they were other things.
And so, after looking at this list carefully, I brought it up to about 314,000 books, which is what you can see now. They still want to tell us to take everything offline, and I just don’t think it’s the government’s job, to tell you what to read, and what not to read.
There’s something even more important: copyright is not a binary thing. For example, all of those books, I could make available to somebody who is blind. Because there’s an international treaty, that says that copyright does not apply, when you make books available to the blind. It’s one of the more progressive things in copyright law. At some point, there will be no copyright, because copyright expires. I have no idea when that’ll be. So we’re certainly not going to delete them, because, eventually, we can make them available.
You may be familiar with the Delhi University case. The Delhi University case cited the Copyright Act, that says, you can make it available in an educational setting for teaching, between a teacher and a pupil. So we could make all of these books available within a university campus.
Deleting the books is not the right answer. Managing the metadata, making it better. Working on translations. Doing better OCR, because we can OCR some languages, but others, we can’t. Making it better. Responding to copyright issues.
One of the things with the DLI server, when it was online, I actually tried writing them, when I first started to mirror the thing. I didn’t get any answers. When the distinguished professor finally came to me, he said, “Well, you did this without talking with us.” I said, “Look, this data’s been spinning since 2015.
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