tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8137713.post8527859980571667209..comments2024-03-19T16:26:45.863-04:00Comments on Digitization 101: Two interesting quotes from if:bookJill Hurst-Wahlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16355882159165026398noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8137713.post-13043217508478595952007-11-23T15:04:00.000-05:002007-11-23T15:04:00.000-05:00This quote disturbed me when I read it, and has ea...This quote disturbed me when I read it, and has each time I've seen it since.<BR/><BR/><I>Over time, as more of this material emerges from copyright protection, we’ll be able to learn things about our culture that we could never have known previously. Soon, the present will become overwhelmingly accessible, but a great deal of older material may never coalesce into a single database.</I><BR/><BR/>This seems to presume an awful lot about the future of copyright law and its impact on technology, which seems frankly contradicted by the last few years' legislative, regulatory and judicial history.<BR/><BR/>I feel like the future is far more likely to be one described in Patrick Leary's "<A HREF="http://www.ncse.kcl.ac.uk/redist/pdf/leary_1.pdf" REL="nofollow">Googling The Victorians</A>":<BR/><BR/><I>If present trends in the direction of perpetual copyright continue, the<BR/>non-canonical print-culture legacy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will soon have become more widely accessible to more people than that of the twentieth and twenty-first, much of which will have been fenced off by its owners and made accessible only by payment of a fee, with strict prohibitions against sharing copies. Despite similar limitations imposed by commercial projects that aggregate public domain material for subscription-based access, the growth in all kinds of online publishing of out-of-copyright material is steadily making the nineteenth-century past more readily knowable and open to scrutiny than ever before.</I>Ben W. Brumfieldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08363399128262210534noreply@blogger.com