The Idealists

by Justin Peters

  Though the World Wide Web is often used as a synonym for the Internet, they are not the same thing. The “information superhighway” metaphor may be hoary, but it still has its uses. A highway is just a road, designed to carry all sorts of vehicles without discrimination. Automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, trailers—they all use the highway, and the highway doesn’t favor one over another. The road is simply infrastructure. You can think of the Internet as a highway that is used by different programs. Your e-mail service is one of them. Instant-messaging applications are another. The World Wide Web is just another of these programs: a piece of software that allows computers to talk to one another.

  The Web became popular because of its linking capacity. In his proposal for Memex, Vannevar Bush advanced the idea that the associative trails between two disparate thoughts or facts could be captured and stored. The Web put a version of this idea into practice by allowing its users to link directly to other documents or websites: a feature called hypertext. The World Wide Web was modeled after an actual web, composed of threads—hypertext links—that spun out in all directions, connecting various far-flung nodes, or websites.

  Like its arachnoid namesake, the Web was good at drawing others in. As more and more people dialed online—especially after the 1993 release of Mosaic, the first visual Web browser—Project Gutenberg grew into an actual project involving more than just Michael Hart and his increasingly weary fingers. As word of the initiative spread, volunteers materialized. “Your project sounds like a wonderful service to mankind and will no doubt increase in value,” wrote a Houston, Texas, man in a 1992 letter to Hart. “How may a person support your efforts?”62

  “Project Gutenberg, what can I say. I wish I could support it with money,” wrote another supporter in 1993, enclosing a floppy disk containing a hand-digitized book. “Instead, I offer public domain etexts in support of this splendid idea.”63

  “Hello, Michael,” wrote a Watertown, Massachusetts, man in 1995. “This diskette includes all the files for the HTML version of A Heap o’ Livin’ by Edgar A. Guest.”64

  “Project Gutenberg is currently posting four books per month in what is called Plain Vanilla ASCII, meaning the files can be read easily on virtually all computers and programs,” Hart wrote in March 1993.65 Two years later, that rate of production had tripled. As the online archive grew, Project Gutenberg began to attract media attention. Even though some journalists did not quite see the point of the digital library, they were nevertheless struck by its novelty. “Why exactly you’d want to download the entire text of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is unclear,” an Associated Press reporter wondered in February 1995, “but there’s something wonderful about the idea that it’s just sitting on its virtual shelf, waiting for you.”66

  Project Gutenberg maintained an online mailing list for volunteers and well-wishers, and at the end of every month, Hart issued a newsletter listing the titles that had recently been digitized. In the March 1995 Project Gutenberg newsletter, he proudly announced the library’s 250th text: a rambling, occasionally bizarre, and incredibly sincere e-book called A Brief History of the Internet, written by none other than Michael Hart himself.67 The book began with a reflection on the history of Project Gutenberg and how far it had come from its obscure origins: “Today there are about 500 volunteers at Project Gutenberg and they are spread all over the globe, from people doing their favorite book then never being heard from again, to PhD’s, department heads, vice-presidents, and lawyers who do reams of copyright research, and some who have done in excess of 20 Etexts pretty much by themselves; appreciate is too small a word for how Michael feels about these, and tears would be the only appropriate gesture.”

  In the early 1980s, Hart had predicted that computing technology might stimulate a new Renaissance. At the time, it was just another of his windy and implausible pronouncements, more empty rhetoric from an embittered dilettante librarian. But the recent success of Project Gutenberg had given Hart new hope. A digital Renaissance still might not have been imminent, but the prospect of a new cultural flowering was no longer just a manic delusion. With two hundred fifty e-books behind him and many more ahead, Hart was more confident than ever that his long-delayed revolution was at hand. “Michael Hart is trying to change Human Nature,” he wrote of himself in A Brief History. “He says Human Nature is all that is stopping the Internet from saving the world.”68

  * * *

  IN 1995, Congress noticed that it had a copyright problem. During the nineteen years since the Copyright Act of 1976 had been signed into law, many European nations had amended their copyright statutes to give creators control over their works for up to seventy years after their deaths. American law, by contrast, still limited the posthumous copyright term to a mere five decades. To address this discrepancy, Senator Orrin Hatch introduced a bill called the Copyright Term Extension Act. Under the act, new works in America would remain under copyright until seventy years after the creator’s death, thus bringing American copyright laws in line with international norms. But when copyright terms expand, the public domain contracts. In 1995, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings to determine whether the trade-off was worthwhile.

  The most popular answer (among those prominent enough to be called to speak) was yes. In grand congressional tradition, a long line of celebrities submitted testimony arguing for a copyright term extension. Alan Menken, a composer who had scored animated films such as Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, announced that leaving the American copyright term in its current state would be “unjustifiable to all Americans, particularly at a time when we are positioning ourselves as a world leader on the global information superhighway.”69 Other musicians entered prepared statements into the record reiterating the injustice of the current situation.

  “When I began my career as a songwriter, I believed that I was building a business that would not only bring enjoyment to people throughout the world, but would also give my children a secure base from which they could, in turn, build their own lives,” wrote Carlos Santana.70 “The impression given to me was that a composer’s songs would remain in his or her family and that they would, one day, be the property of the children and their grandchildren after them,” wrote Bob Dylan.71 “On a daily basis, I wear many hats,” wrote Don Henley, but instead of expanding on that intriguing image and describing the origins of his capelophilia, he simply explained how unjust it would be if, in 2050, his grandchildren were unable to collect the royalties from “Tequila Sunrise.”

  As the songwriters argued for a copyright term extension, others attempted to diminish the public domain. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and a longtime copyright lobbyist, portrayed the public domain as the equivalent of a weedy, untended vacant lot, telling Congress that it was “important to understand that public domain means nobody really cares because nobody owns it.”72 After Valenti concluded his testimony, the committee chairman, Senator Hatch, noted exactly how much he enjoyed being able to view first-run movies at the offices of the MPAA, and said that “the big reason I like to do it is, frankly, just to be able to say hello to you on a regular basis.”73

  A few law professors defended the value of the public domain. The American University professor Peter Jaszi noted, “In my academic wanderings through the legislative history of American copyright, I have been struck by how seldom and how little the Congress has heard from the users of public domain material, a loose community that is both more numerous and more diverse than one might expect.”74 The sentiment of the room, however, was not in Jaszi’s favor.

  What was the purpose of the public domain? Congress hadn’t cared to seriously consider the question in 1976, and the body remained indifferent in 1995. “It should be obvious that if laws such as [the Copyright Term Extension Act] continued to be passed every 20 years or so, that nothing will ever enter into Public Domain status again and the work of people such as the Internet Wiretap, the Onlin
e Book Initiative, and Project Gutenberg will soon be over,” Hart wrote to supporters at the time.75 Just as the AI Lab exodus in the early 1980s had threatened the survival of the hacker ethic, the popularization of the Web in the mid-1990s—and the concurrent emergence of its commercial potential—threatened to marginalize the digital utopians who had been its first colonists.

  “While I certainly lay no claims to inventing the Internet, I was the first I have ever heard of to understand what it was to become over the first few decades of its existence,” Hart wrote on his blog. “This pioneering spirit is usually one of the first things to go—once the ‘dude’ and ‘suits’ have their way and starting with the politicking that places people in power who have no idea of the who, what, where, how, why and when power originated, the power they have usurped from those who created it.”76 For Project Gutenberg, this point was reinforced early in 1996.

  The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had indirectly powered Project Gutenberg since its rudimentary mainframe days back in the 1970s; after he graduated, Hart had been allowed continued access to the school’s computing resources. Not only was Hart an alumnus, he also worked for the university as a consultant, was a familiar figure on campus, and had come to count on the school’s goodwill and support, both of which appeared to be cheerfully provided. In 1989, an official in the university’s computing services office wrote a letter of endorsement for Hart and his nascent digital library. “Were our resources greater, we would take on Project Gutenburg [sic] ourselves,” the official wrote. “As it is, we can offer limited assistance and unlimited encouragement.”77

  Just over six years later, the school’s assistance and advocacy for Project Gutenberg had declined. The needs of the institution were changing. Subscription database companies that charged access fees and reinvested that revenue in improved services were eclipsing free services such as Project Gutenberg, with their unadorned text files and their volunteer laborers and their intensely antistatist founders. The first online library was no longer necessarily the best online library.

  When Hart first encountered the Xerox Sigma V in 1971, the Materials Research Lab had encouraged its system programmers to experiment, in hopes that they might find new uses for the machines. Now the university knew what computers were for—and what they weren’t for. Project Gutenberg provided insufficient value to the university to merit continued institutional support. In January 1996, citing increased demand for its computing resources, the University of Illinois’s Computer and Communications Services Office informed Hart that his access to the university’s computers would be revoked that coming July, almost twenty-five years to the day that Project Gutenberg began.78

  Hart was stunned. Project Gutenberg had been growing steadily, and Hart’s goal of putting ten thousand e-books online by the millennium seemed difficult but attainable. Eviction from the University of Illinois’s system would devastate that ambition. He realized that the school had to be convinced to reverse its decision. He had to show it just how much Project Gutenberg was really worth.

  So Hart asked fans and friends of Project Gutenberg to e-mail the university and urge a reconsideration. “Please keep [your e-mails] short, just say that you want to support this project and you think this is a worthwhile use of the computer systems at the University of Illinois,” Hart wrote. “It doesn’t really cost much of anything to keep us on the system, it is that the political climate here is such that we are in danger of having our accounts thrown out with the general cleanup of all people without the proper official connections; something we have had very little of during our 25 years of service, and which would not be easy to get.”79

  Hundreds and hundreds of e-mails arrived from around the world, testifying to just how much Hart’s homemade library meant to its many users. “I feel that Project Gutenberg, the GNU project and similar efforts are really the embodiment of the spirit of the Internet. These groups do their work as a great labor of love, as a gift to all of humanity,” wrote one supporter.80 “I think that it would be a terrible shame if during this time of enormous growth of the Internet, Project Gutenberg turned into one of those things that *used to be around*,” wrote another.81

  “When people have fast, convenient access to works of literature large and small, important and insignificant, they have access to a broader range of thought than they might otherwise have. And they have the opportunity to compare, contrast and synthesize the works into a body of knowledge that they could not reasonably have been able to amass without such access,” wrote yet another Gutenberg fan. “Please continue Project Gutenberg. It’s [sic] cost is so much less than its value.”82

  The inflood of support set the stage for a classic narrative denouement in which the underdog triumphs, the villains repent, and the heroes all live on the network happily ever after. But real life rarely resolves as neatly as fiction. The e-mail campaign failed to persuade the university to keep Project Gutenberg alive.

  “We are not sure how we will be reaching you after midnight, but we will be working on as many ways as possible,” Hart wrote to Project Gutenberg supporters that June, one day before his system access was scheduled to expire83:

  For all history there has never been enough of anything for us except a supply of air for us to breathe, and now, for the first time, there has been enough copies of some books, that everyone for the rest of history can have a copy.

  Please don’t let this first time for something like this be the last.

  While the eviction was a setback for Project Gutenberg, it didn’t destroy it forever. In 1997, the project found a new home at Carnegie Mellon University. Eventually, Project Gutenberg incorporated as a nonprofit foundation. All the while, Hart and his volunteers kept at their lonely digital labors.

  On September 4, 1997, Hart triumphantly announced the release of the thousandth e-book in the Gutenberg archives, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Though he took a moment to celebrate what he deemed “the pinnacle of my career,” he couldn’t help but predict that future milestones would likely be few and far between, unless the American reading public took control of its nation’s copyright laws. Project Gutenberg had become an eloquent counterargument to copyright advocates’ dismissive claims about the public domain. It demonstrated just how easily a network could be used to breathe new life into classics that might otherwise go unseen.

  Despite the existence of initiatives such as Project Gutenberg, despite the emergence of the Internet as a new medium for information retrieval and distribution, the same official attitudes about intellectual property prevailed. The public domain was regarded as a penalty rather than as an opportunity. Parochial concerns were conflated with the public interest. The rise of the Internet might portend an informational revolution, but from the standpoint of the people in power, Hart warned, revolution was a bad thing.

  “Every single time a new publishing technique has promised to get the common people a home library, laws have been passed to stop, dead in its tracks, this kind of ‘Information Age,’ ” Hart wrote. “Information Age??? For Whom??? We hope it will be for you.”84

  5

  THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

  In 1995, a New Hampshire man named Eric Eldred sat down with his three young daughters to help them with some schoolwork.1 The Eldred triplets had been assigned to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and they found it slow going. Eldred wondered if perhaps Hawthorne’s prose wasn’t the problem so much as the outdated bound format in which that prose was presented. So he created a website and put The Scarlet Letter online, studded with explanatory hyperlinks: a bedazzled, annotated version of the plain-text e-books found at Project Gutenberg.

  While the project didn’t turn his daughters into Hawthorne fans, Eldred enjoyed the work all the same, and he started to digitize Hawthorne’s other novels. Soon, he had built a comprehensive online archive of the author’s entire bibliography. Such a project might not seem particularly novel from today’s vantage, but in the mid-1990s, Eldre
d’s efforts were absolutely ahead of their time. In 1997, a National Endowment for the Humanities initiative called edSITEment deemed Eldred’s Hawthorne site one of the twenty best humanities resources online.2

  Eldred uploaded more works to his “Eldritch Press” website: Henry James’s Daisy Miller, Louisa May Alcott’s story “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving,” several books by William Dean Howells. (“Copyright should be perpetual,” Howells had argued in 1879.)3 Eldred’s project began to assume a broader significance. “I imagined that what I was doing was promoting democracy, respect for other people, mutual understanding, literacy, appreciation for literature . . . and a lot of nice warm and fuzzy things,” Eldred would later write. “I wanted to show everyone how great all this was.”4

  Like Project Gutenberg in its early years, Eldritch Press was a one-man operation; the texts were created on Eldred’s home computer and uploaded over a cable modem connection. By 1998, despite these limitations, Eldritch Press featured over a hundred megabytes’ worth of classic titles formatted for easy online reading.5 The bulk of these titles had first been published before 1923, and thus, in 1998, stood unquestionably within the public domain.6

  Eldred lived in Derry, New Hampshire, a large farm town near Manchester that was, for a time, the home of poet Robert Frost. It was Eldred’s eventual hope to honor the poet by creating an Eldritch Press edition of New Hampshire, Frost’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1923 poetry collection, which was scheduled to enter the public domain on January 1, 1999.7 The book contains many of the poet’s best-known compositions: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” along with the title poem, in which the narrator begins by denouncing commerce as disgraceful.