Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive

I'm at Brewster Kahle's talk on the Internet Archive. My favorite quip so far: "The major bug of the library of Alexandria was that it burned." Brewster's a man with a vision — he's thinking way way ahead. He's working to mirror the Archive to the actual (current) Library of Alexandria in Egypt, "on the other side of the fault-line." My last rant on this, about digitizing my books, spurred numerous suggestions to read "Double Fold," which I've been getting regular reports on from my co-worker, Seth, who's working his way through it and gave a talk on it at a conference we attended together recently. Brewster understands that the mutability and ephemerality and overall suckiness of bits are also their strength (something I'm going to be speaking about tomorrow). Brewster's talking about the legalities, technical challenges and, most interestingly, the social challenges of building the Internet Archive. I love his response to people who object on the basis of copyright violation, which is basically, "Dear Sir/Madam: My deepest apologies for infringing your copyright. I will now remove your work from the historical record. Enjoy oblivion."

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