To: Biodynamic Food and Farming Discussion <bdnow@envirolink.org>, permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [permaculture] Times Higher Education - Liberate and disseminate
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:01:20 -0400
<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.
[permaculture] Times Higher Education - Liberate and disseminate,
Lawrence F. London, Jr., 04/15/2008