A Brief History of the Internet / The Bright Side: The Dark Side

by Michael Hart; Maxwell Fuller

This copyright remained virtually the same length, 28 years, for quite a while, and the first United States copyright was for two 14 year periods, the second automatically given on request.

When books once again became too popular at the turn of the last century, and many publishers began selling inexpensive sets of a variety of extensive subjects, the copyrights were doubled again so that the 14 years plus 14 year extension became 28 years with a 28 year extension, which was done around 1909.

Then, in the last half of this century, books once again were to become too widely spread, this time with the advent of the xerox machine. Not only were new laws made to curb copying, but those old laws were extended from that 28+28=56 years to 75 years, and this was done in 1975 or so.

Now with the advent of truly UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION available to the world via computer files, books are once again getting to be too widely spread, and further restriction is in the works, this time only 20 years after the last extension, which was for about 20 years. Work is already underway for a permanent copyright to keep us from putting "the Library of Congress" on our disks.

I have said for years that by the time computers get as far into the future as they have come from the past, that we will be able to hold all of the Library of Congress in one hand, but I added, "They probably won't let us do it."

Let me explain that for a minute; back in 1979 Project Gutenberg bought its first hard drive for about $1500 dollars, for Apple's new Personal Computer. Not counting inflation we can buy drives that will hold 1,000 times as much data for the same price. The true cost, counting inflation, would be that our $1500 would buy closer to 10,000 times as much space because our $1500 from 1979 is equivalent to about $5,000 today, if we get the new "magneto- resistive" drive from IBM. This is NOT counting ZIP compression or other compression programs. If you count them, you would get about 5,000 times as much data for your money today as in 1979.

5 million bytes = $1500 in 1979 = one copy of Shakespeare 12 billion bytes = $4500 in 1995 [inflation has tripled plus] 25 billion bytes . . .with compression programs.

This is 5,000 copies of the Complete Shakespeare on one disk, or less then $1 per copy. This upsets those who think there should not be unlimited numbers of books in the world, so definition of copyright and consequently the definition of public domain is in danger of being changed, as they have been every time in history that the public got too much information.

If the trend listed above continues for only 15 more years, 2010 will see drives containing 25 million copies of Shakespeare, for the same price as the drive that could only hold one copy thirty years earlier, and the price per copy will be so low that it may take more money to run the calculation to figure the prices than the prices actually are.

This is the real reason copyright gets extended, history repeats itself, over and over again, and "those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it." What they want is to ensure you do not study history, so they can do the same things over and over, because that is the easiest way for them to make money. Change, especially the kinds that are happening in the computers' world, is what scares them. When changes comes along, they try as hard as they can to keep things the way they were, and nowhere is it more obvious than now. Most copyrighted materials are gone, out of print forever, in only five years, maybe 75% in ten years, in 15 years probably 87% are out of print, 20 years at that rate is 93%, 25 years is 96%, 30 years is 98% and 35 years would be well over 99%. . .and that doesn't even take into account the shorter term runs of newspapers, magazines, TV show, movies, records and all those things that most people don't even expect to last more than year in the public eye. The fact is that probably only .1% or less of anything published in the 1920s is still in print for the original edition. . .that is only one item out of 1,000, and that estimate is probably quite high. The point is that can our copyright laws support the withholding of 1,000 books for 1 that is actually available. . .we don't make our driving laws for the 1 out of 1,000 that could be race car drivers, that would be one of the silliest laws on record. We have to make our laws so the law applies well to everyone, not just to make the rich richer— or in this case the Information Rich richer.