permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>]

<http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=401386&c=1>
Liberate and disseminate
10 April 2008
Free information freely available is the rallying cry of Erik Ringmar, who wants others to join in putting restricted 
documents on the web
The The Internet Archive is an amazing place. Most famous for maintaining the net's largest repository of old web pages 
- some 2 petabytes of data - it also collects many other kinds of material: old movies, radio and television shows, 
books. The Americans have put entire libraries online, one scanned volume after the other. It's all for free and you 
don't need any particular credentials to get access. A search for "China" provides 1,628 titles (mainly 19th-century 
books); a search for "Tocqueville" gives you 67 hits (lots of rare secondary sources). Although the past may be a 
foreign country, the friendly border guards at the Internet Archive hand out free visas to all travellers.

A neat feature of the site is that it allows uploads. As a result, you can treat the Internet Archive like an academic 
version of YouTube, a place where you can share material and promote your work. Remember your book on the transformation 
of Spanish political parties in the 1990s? The one that didn't sell that well? Why not deposit it online so that someone 
may actually read it? And why not be generous to fellow scholars and upload your source material once you've finished 
your research? Scholarship is all about collaboration, after all. And think of colleagues in less well-resourced 
locations who don't have easy access to fancy research libraries.

<...>

So, I've taken it upon myself to start an organisation called MLOP, the "Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers". 
What I do is hack into restricted websites, download the documents I'm interested in, and then use my favourite 
open-source paint program to remove the copyright statements from each page. Next I assemble the pages into one single 
pdf file and upload it to the Internet Archive, where it will become universally available to both researchers and 
citizens. Yes, it does take a bit of time, but it's a very worthy cause (and I have a hardworking research assistant to 
help me).

I feel strongly about this, and I'm prepared to live with the legal consequences of my actions. This, after all, is the 
new frontier of civil rights - the right of access to information. How else can corruption be stopped and falsehoods 
exposed? How else can people in power be held accountable? I'd go to prison for the old parliamentary papers if I had 
to. Ever after I would proudly brag about having liberated an old House of Commons report from the clutches of market 
capitalism.

Why not join me in my revolution? It's easy and fun. If you have a university affiliation, you have access to all kinds 
of restricted material that easily can be redirected to an open-access website. Do it! If you have a scanner, you can 
even raid your university library and share the loot with the rest of us. Serve the common good and liberate an old 
document today!

Postscript :

Erik Ringmar is professor of social and cultural studies at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. His 
books are available at the Internet Archive.