From: Karsten Bänder (Karsten.Baender@ivm.de)
Date: Mon May 03 1999 - 09:37:29 MDT
> > For all works in the Library of Congress to be transcribed into
> digital form and
> > made available on the Internet would be a wonderful thing, and
> would do much to
> > expand the breadth of human knowledge, and I might even term it
> a just use of
> > tax dollars. To be sure, there are copyright issues involved,
> but any number of
> > uncopyrighted works or those whose copyrights had expired could
> be put online.
> > If one can go to a library and check out a copyrighted work for
> free, why not
> > over the Internet? It will certainly enhance inter-library
> loan when more
> > material is available for electronic request and delivery.
>
> Use tax dollars to pay for the wholesale ripoff of millions of people's
> copyright rights? I don't think so. It will have to be a pay as you go
> system, with micropayments for each use of copyrighted material.
Oh yeah, and here we are again - information only for those whoe are able to
pay. I do not want do be considered Socialist - my mother comes for Eastern
Europe and I had the chnace to wittness the spirit of a Communist
Dictatorship myself - but Information is something which should not be kept
this way. Your copyright is kept by not allowing anyone to falsify it, but
it should be available freely - anywhere. You know, lack of information and
communication is one of the main causes of poverty. Manhattan has more
telephones than the entire African continent. Most of Africa is still in the
stone age, mainly because there are a whole lot of people who do not want a
change to this. You want it to remain this way?
But to keep you capitalists happy: The state might pay you some bucks if the
information you provide is interesting enough so that the public interest is
served with the publication of the information in question.
Think logical, we'll have to get away from this capitalist way of using
information. We need the synergy effects of the mass availability of
information, when and wherever it is needed. The non-availability of
information is in fact a typical trait of any hierarchy. Information means
power. If you control the flow of information, you control all people who
get the information (or not). This is not keyed to a 1984-style
dictatorship, it works with any form of government, up to and including a
democracy.
Take for example the american war of 1863. Haven't you been taught that it
was fought to free the slaves? I was told this, too. But no country ever
fought a war out of humanitarian ideas. That war was fought because the
North would not tolerate the decision of the South to make an independant
state. It was an economic war, the industrial north against the agricultural
south. The same is true for the second world war. You wouldn't want to tell
me the US entered the war because of the fate of the Jews? Or that Britain
and France entered the war because of the fate of Poland? Bullshit. It was
simply a question of distribution of power.
Much the same is true for Zaire/Congo. The old dictator - Mobutu - was a
French puppet, the new monkey dictator - Kabila - is remote-controlled by
the US. Of course, a democratic state would never do such evil things. Of
course, humanitarian ideals are held very high within a state who respects
the human rights and the politics are streamlined accordingly. Of course no
politician gives a penny for these empty words. As long as they keep this
information for themselves and no one gets really involved, this works fine.
> Most information on tapes is raw data, lists of names, numbers, etc.
> Magnetic tapes, stored properly, do not crumble or otherwise degrade
> easily. I am still using 9 track magnetic tapes that are older than I am
> on a regular basis for list processing operations.
Wrongo, BASF conducted a test which concluded, that even under ideal storage
circumstances, 100% reliability is guaranteed only five years. Your 9-track
magnetic tapes still work because they store a huge stream of analog data.
Your ears have a built-in noise-reduction which screens out most of the bad
audio data that comes in. But gradually, the quality of these recordings
will fade. In adio recordings, the quality simply gets worse. In data tapes,
it gets lost, because eventually, the errors destroy too many bits of data,
making an error correction impossible. Much more with the high-packed data
tapes of today.
I visited a large picture library some years ago and was surprised to see
that most of the color photos were transferred to black-and-white
diapositive films. This is simply because over the time, the colours
eventually fade and change. If you look at a photo from the early sixties,
you'll notice some strange colour defects. After all, the chemical process
doesn't stop whne the picture leaves the lab. Today, this practice hasn't
changed - only that the pictures are stored in digital form too, this time
in colour.
Karsten
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:03:40 MST