 Well, welcome to the session on Digital Library, Digital Registry. I have just the perfect people on the panel for what I'm hoping to do. So I'll just move ahead with it. I'd like to introduce the topic a little bit and then engage in a dialogue with the panelists about it. I feel that this topic responds in a very direct way to the concern expressed in the feedback, looking for an action item, a place to start. That's very much the way I think of this. I got started myself as a character in the internet space. When back somewhere around 1990, I assumed the identity of Eon, the dean of cyberspace. This had a certain comic character to it, and yet it was, for me, never truly comic. It was actually conceptual. My background is in mathematics, and I was thinking about cyberspace from the beginning like a mathematical set, the set consisting of bits. And at the beginning, of course, this was a null set. There was nothing. But then with the internet's creation, suddenly there starts to be a populated set of bits. And you could see this bit set grow, and you could explore in that space. You could use that space for anything you could find in it at a given point in the growth of that space. Imagine it as a set of bits. I felt copyright intrude. And copyright intruded in a way that contaminated by my lights every bit in the space, because you couldn't tell one bit from another as far as copyright was concerned. But by using a bit, you made yourself subject to the threat of litigation. Now, Terry made a simple map on the board yesterday where he had public domain on one side, and then he had a nice broad mess of chalk in the middle, which was disputed space. And he had copyright on the other side. Well, I think thinking in terms of these maps is extremely useful. But let's just parse them out more carefully. You take this bit space, and you identify in it four kinds of bits, four categories of bits for purposes of our thought. One are public domain bits, defined as usable bits. You can use them for anything. They're ours. We are free to use those bits. All right, then there are three other categories. There is way over on the other side, the copyright, all rights reserved, lockdown, industry-labeled bits. There they are. You've got to pay to use them. And there are two categories in the middle. In fact, both of these categories are in the midst of Terry's mess. They are the orphan works, the bits that are copyrighted, but you can't find out how to get permission. And they are Creative Commons bits. That is bits which ostensibly come with a permission, but the problem is you can't trust it. How do you know that the Creative Commons label that's a fix to the thing you're about to use actually represents the legal permissions that it purports to represent? How do you know who even put the label on there? So in terms of a user perspective, from the point of view of the von Hippel world, you might say, that is the world of people who want to use what's there, that's the map. All right, now we're going to talk today about digital library, digital registry. First off, Terry, does the proposition make sense to you that if you're going to have a sensible regime of intellectual property law, that it cries out to be based on a registry? That this idea that if you have a sensible system of land that only works with a registry, by parallel thought, when you come to the world of ephemeral property, it only makes sense to build a digital permissions regime on a digital registry of the property. Does that make sense to you? Good. All right. Come up a little closer to the microphone. Yes, definitely. There's advantages that come with if they're going to be assertions of rights as to things, knowing what those rights are and who asserts them. So it's going to be an odd example. But some years ago, I was giving some advice to governments in Central America about real property systems. And it turns out that one of the most serious problems of conflicting principle six Central American countries is nobody know who owned what land. This had some predictable adverse consequences in which you couldn't get a loan to build a house or to establish a business because the banks wouldn't advance for any money because they couldn't rely on the quality of the title that you would assert in the property as collateral, so to be good at economic development. It also had other less obvious disadvantages in exemplified, not in Central America, but in Peru, where a similar effort to establish a registry dramatically increased the number of girls going to school. Why? No one expected this, but the answer is that in the absence of clear property rights in the crowded cities in Peru, a family fell obliged to leave one member home during the day to assert ownership because otherwise there was some risk of being ousted by a squatter and then being unable to oust the squatter. And so who's going to say no? It's the girls and the family. So there are many economic and social advantages to knowing who owns what. So if there are any assertions of right in the digital space, it's essential that we have a better system for knowing who owns what. Good. All right, so we then start with a kind of an agreement that the idea of a registry, a comprehensive registry of intellectual property, if it's to be the basis of people asserting rights and permissions and so forth, makes sense. It then evolves to an engineering and design problem. How do we build this? Well, you might first think, oh my god, this is impossible. There's just so much intellectual property. It's almost infinite. And so at one point, almost a year ago now, I assembled a group of engineers at Stuart Sheber's shop over in computer science and talked about the difficulty of building a database of intellectual property. And I basically got blown off by the engineers. They said, look, we build a registry of the stars. It's not a problem of size. That's like, come on. The problem that you guys have got building the database is that the person who programs the database has got to be given clear instructions into which boxes what goes. Which means that you lawyers have got to figure out the rules that you want us to program into the box. So there's an engineering problem that is a function of how complicated the different domains of copyright are to capture in an engineering sense. At the moment in the world, there is movement towards digital registries. It's been active from the highest levels of copyright, WIPO, the big companies are seeing the need for this. But they've also run into the problems of having to agree on just what the rules are. And they find that that is horrendously difficult. So now, John Palfrey, would you describe for the audience your digital library of America project? And would you, in the course of describing it, be thinking about the difficulties of coming to terms on what would go into a registry clearly enough so that you could program it for the four categories of bits that we're talking about. Public domain, Creative Commons, Orphan Works, outright clear copyright with just how to do it. I would be happy to. It's a long story. So I don't want to take up the whole session with it. You should cut me off where it deserves to be cut off. But the basic concept is I think from the beginning of the thinking about the internet, you certainly involved and many others in this room, have thought about the idea that we could create, roughly speaking, a digital library of Alexandria, that one of the great promises of the internet would be to make available the full cultural, scientific, historical record of mankind in this space that you're discussing. And I think that dream has been pursued a number of times in a number of ways without success. And I think we actually have the traction around a version of that right now in the form of something called the Digital Public Library of America Project. The idea is not for any one institution to do it, but to establish a community of people. I think of it very much akin to Wikipedia, in a way, a community of people who are working on pieces of this. Jeffrey Schnapp has a great example. Stuart Cheber has another. All the different universities that are scanning our collections as examples, all of the public libraries that are scanning their collections, the local historical societies that are or could scan their collections, to put them into a common space and then to allow on an open basis for libraries to take these materials and to make local collections from them, to do so on the basis of open code as well. So a number of organizations have helped already to code through the beta sprint you represented before, a set of open code that could be used to take these materials and make them available broadly to the public, an open set of metadata so that the records, the catalog records, for instance, that we create could be shared freely among these different libraries, as well as other metadata about the information. Little tools and services as well. We know that librarians don't necessarily have everywhere the skill to be able to create a digital library. I love the idea in particular of a scan of Bego, the idea that you get to win a Bego and drive it around the country and bring it to a local historical society somewhere and say, bring out your scans. And you'd have them come and digitize a series of key records important to this local area, which would then be put into the public commons, but also accessible locally in such a way that maybe nobody would ever access it outside of Darien, Connecticut, if that's where you were. But maybe, actually, historians might like to look across 100 small towns at a certain point in history and so forth. And then last, it would be a strong community of people who would be working on this. And I think actually one of the ways that the community might be relevant is exactly in the context of the registry. I had been thinking of roughly in three zones, but I'll work with your four zones. It's plain that we could do this today with public domain materials. This is not a hard premise. So Harvard has hundreds of thousands of images alone that are in the public domain, whether they're books or pictures or audio-visual materials, that we could put into the DPLA today and likewise others. And there's no particular constraint other than money and time and so forth. On the other side of the spectrum, plainly things in copyright would be highly restricted in this environment that I'm talking about. So a new book that Scott Bradner writes immediately held in copyright some combination of him and his publisher. That would be very hard to put in a public domain space like this and have any library lend it. And there's a very large discussion about what e-lending is allowed in the context of digital materials. I wanna put a little footnote there, which is it might be that we could scan it and do certain things with it. Libraries, turns out, have particular privileges under the Copyright Act. And one question is whether or not it would be lawful for us to scan Scott's new book, put it in this digital library and allow libraries, for instance, only to relay it to people in certain contexts, for instance, protections for people with disabilities that exist in the law. So set aside whether we could do something with that, but it's plainly severely limited. And then I think of the sort of messy gray zone that Terry mentioned, which is a combination, I think of the orphan works and those materials that are licensed but where you might not want to rely on license. My view is I would rely on the Creative Commons licenses. I think we should lean into this. It was created here. We should believe in it and go with it. The orphan works are trickier, of course. I think you could take some risk with respect to orphan works, but I think absent clear title and legislation, that's a tricky zone. Now there are projects, as you have noted, that seek to put things from, or take things from one zone and put it to the other. So, it's a wonderful project based out of Michigan through the Hathi Trust project. And it's basically designed to free things from that middle zone and put them in the public domain zone. So the idea is they have a large number of people and some grants who are working through materials that have been digitized and trying to establish plainly that they belong in the public domain versus otherwise. And I think your registry idea underlies that concept, that if we had a community devoted to this digital public library of America idea and where instead of being Wikipedia's creating new articles, what they were doing was creating the metadata that in fact freed up materials to make them free to all in this digital public library of America. I could easily see that pathway as a great way to activate people around the world potentially in this particular way. All right, now I wanna add another dimension into this. The feature of the space that's polluting is the threat of litigation. That's what you're trying to fend off. And one of the problems with litigation is that its resolution is not always based on the merits. It's often based on the bargaining situation where when the suit is brought, the lawyer of the institution that's being sued is put in a defensive position where the best thing to do is to pay off or sign off or take it, when in doubt, take it out. The whole threat of litigation is really the forward arm of copyright and used very aggressively. We could say the same in the pattern area, but all right, we're talking copyright here. So that the objective of the registry that I think is needed is not merely a registry, but a legally defensible and legally defended registry. So that the proposal that I'm putting forth is one which calls for a collaboration between the libraries that you're describing and the great law firms of the world. So for example, let's take the public domain as the starting point. You say, we could do that right away. We don't need anybody's permission, we've got it, it's all, we could do that. We don't have it all yet scanned and so forth, there's a lot of work and a lot of money to go. Yes, yes, yes. But public domain. But the threat of litigation is not a sort of damocles above our head in this particular respect. So now Jeffrey, I want to come to you as a curator. When you talk about curating things, you're really talking about discriminating, making choices. And if you, collaborating on a library curatorial project, were to be joined by let's say pro bono legal help. You could be confident, do you think, in curating public domain works, including the declaration of public domain status? Well, it's a, not just as a curator, but as somebody who writes books. And I have, and who has a particular appetite for nooks and crannies of the historical record that pass on observe, which is to say, a world that is very much in Terry's gray zone where most of the objects that I'm interested in working with, citing, reusing are orphaned or abandoned in some form or other. I can tell you that the notion of some kind of transparent and mechanism, whether it's as a curator in a physical sense or as a digital curator or as an honor to me, is really a fundamental realm of freedom that I could only dream of as most of the time. I have my own views about how aggressively issues in intellectual property should be confronted, but they are always at odds with every publishing house, every museum, every institutional interlocutor, certainly the general counsel of every university I've ever taught at. And of course, as a practicing scholar, the lesson that you derive from that experience is don't ask, do, because you can only change the culture in your own small way by adopting such a state. Otherwise, you become a prisoner of essentially a kind of library theme world where you would have to dedicate yourself full time to permissions issues rather than to critical thinking or historically grounded research. For me, this issue, the issue of the library as an institution is really an issue that has a very deep history in the sense that libraries, as I'm sure most of you are well aware, have been institutions of privilege over the course of their history. They were largely built as institutions around a priesthood and that priesthood had privileged access to the sense of resources of which they were the guardians and the custodians and is thanks to that priesthood that we have the cultural value of the sense. At the same time, one of the great adventures of the modern era, the era that created the property system that we're talking about here has involved the substitution, the gradual substitution of that figure of the priest with the citizen in some form or another. In other words, a kind of democratization of access to forms of knowledge. And I think where the Digital Public Library of America project resonates for me really powerfully is, I think it has the potential to really complete that process of democratization in a really radical way that goes far beyond the sort of state at which it exists in physical libraries and then John alluded to one of the dimensions of that which is of course that of how certain forms of local knowledge, like local history, bought its knowledge that no research library would ever comprehend or include in its collecting practices. Collecting practices are always practices of exclusion in some fundamental set of ways. And they have to be because the project of total inclusion, the project that already in the 17th and 18th centuries seemed unimaginable to bring to full fruition. Not to mention, once you look at the exponential growth of forms of publication, of categories of objects that now have become objects of collection. In short, there is no such thing as the universal library. So what does the digital add as value to this conversation? I think it is this possibility of a world that's user centered rather than priest centered, if you like, where ordinary citizens are the archivists, the journalists, the historians, and that doesn't eliminate the possibility for expertise in forms of expert knowledge on the contrary. It enriches them, it places them in contact with an audience where models of quality can speak to a much broader population. So in terms of trying to realize that vision, the question of copyright is, of course, a central question because it is the single obstacle that stands in the way of the kind of freedom that I was assuming in that scenario is describing. And the most palpable example I can offer, just for a little bit of an understanding here, is the paradoxical boom in late Victorian studies that Google books has given rise to. The Victorian era may not be the period that you follow with the greatest level of attention, but the fact that the record that Google books is biased towards knowledge that was produced before 1923, okay? Produces some interesting effects. In many of the social sciences which were born in the late 19th century, the old psychology and psychology, social psychology, those are fields that are not very interested in excavating their own history. Typically, there is not a historian of sociology on the faculty of sociology department, or it's rare. In psychology, people are focused on contemporary experimental practices. So all this dirty laundry that's the story of the genesis of these disciplines is now so widely available that there's been an upsurge in historical work on the genesis of these fields. Now that's, of course, a happy outcome, but wouldn't it be a happier outcome if the borderline between knowledge that was freely available and where, for instance, computational tools could be used, even to do things with that knowledge that couldn't be done with conventional forms of that access didn't stop in 1923, for instance? So for me, this question is a question that's very much at the heart of the question of the role that power plays in channeling and limiting models of access. The copyright system, and I have experienced it myself, is enforced as a function of who you are and what kind of heft you have. I just, in the process of surviving a battle with a paperback publisher who bought the rights to reprint Marshall McLuhan's, the medium is the massage, and several other Marshall McLuhan books, about which I've written the book, which is a history of the experimental paperback of the late 1960s and early 70s, it was an attempt to create a kind of television age versus cybernetic age version of the paperback, to reinvent the book for the television era. These are books that are made out of cut and paste, they are cut and paste books using other books. They are remixes of public material. And yet, both the apparent owners of the copyright and the republisher of the volumes, who have permission only to reprint are invoking their claims on this material, which itself was remixed by the authors of the book. And you can see the kind of labyrinth that somebody who's an end user. Now the nature, I just concluded, the nature of my book is about the ways in which forms of visual argument become just as central to the logic of a text as verbal argument. To show that, I need to show thumbnails of the graphic logic of a book, page by page by page, it's a short paperback, it's a 128 page paperback. The fight we got into immediately was an objection that that compromises the product, these are thumbnails that are thumbnail size, that that compromises the contract between the publisher, the republisher of the book. And therefore, we were immediately, my collaborator is a graphic artist and I were subject to the threat of a lawsuit that initiated at the New York Book Fair with the publisher storming out of the room screaming that his team of lawyers would be knocking on our door next. You can see the problem, there's knowledge that is compromised by my not being able to do anything except point to the ubiquitous copies of these very texts that exist on the internet, but in an illegal space. All right, so now let me put where we've gotten so far together into the form of a coherent action proposal that is coming onto the table. The idea is to aspire to build a comprehensive intellectual property registry. The idea is to see it as an engineering program problem first and to start with what we can do, what is within our capacity to do, both because we have the material, we have the rights, we have the resources. There's nothing that stops us. That's something that we could do to establish our freedom in this space. And I think of it completely as an act to establish, to build freedom in the space. We are building the cyberspace and we are building freedom into it by clarifying bits and legally defending them, setting them up in a way that's legally defensible. So I then ask you to imagine a kind of fast forward in which this has happened. We have, let's imagine, a substantial group of the digital public libraries of America acting to curate their collections of public domain materials, but only those that are impeccably in the public domain as determined in collaboration with esteemed legal associates and with pro bono lawyers willing to defend the declarations so that these are truly reliable. Imagine that that database then exists. That then becomes a competitive environment to the contaminated environment. And just the kinds of things that Geoffrey's talking about with Victorian literature starts to happen. All right, now, Terry. If you imagine that there is a functioning, legally defended public domain registry for public domain works, and outside of it, there is the body of creative commons, creators, and would-be users if they were only sure. And yes, John, you'll use creative commons, but the commercial investor who's about to, you know, it doesn't want that lawsuit to come and stop them. The sense I'm looking for is the desire of the creative common creator to get their work into the registry in a way that the registry would accept where the requirement for entry to the registry is legal reliability of the registration. And I don't mean to limit you to creative commons, I'd actually love to test the wonderful range of your knowledge. What other works would you see as an engineering matter and legal matter would be the next works to introduce into this defended zone of free bits, of clearly usable bits? How about government publications? So we could feed them right into this registry, no problem. That's one of the few things in which, as to which established principle of the United States is not in all cases. And not in all states, right? So only US government works. So let me take up a few of the issues here. Yes, good. The other question you've heard is one of them. So first suggestion in an effort to be, once and up. Apparently not. To contribute to the concrete project. Yes, yes. Very good. First suggestion is, I don't think it makes sense to aspire as you put it to a comprehensive registry. This is one distinction between land and the cyberspace. Land is finite, and the cultural products as a practical matter are infinite. You will never map at all. So that, recognizing that then echoes through the design next suggestion. It will, your chances of partial success grow to the extent you can make it a distributed project. Distributed not just in the sense that you're not gonna have a single Fort Knox holding all the records, they're gonna be distributed across institutions. But distributed in a more fundamental sense in which if the registry is built by people who have an interest in filing, it'll grow much faster and more effectively than if it relies upon the John and his teams to locate sets of material, catalog and curate them and put them in. So if you can make it in the interests of people to say either this is mine or I donate this to the public or in the interviewee case, here's what the right side is. Certainly here are the right side don't. It'll grow much faster. Next practical suggestion. I think this is really, I think your idea, I think it's your idea of enlisting law firms to defend the assertions of permission is a very good one. But it ought to be supplemented with an insurance idea because just charging the associates who are gonna do this work in the law firms with the responsibility to defend really nilly every document against attack, it doesn't make sense because those are gonna show up and they're gonna say actually, this one's clearly owned by Disney just in the right way in the sense that you know, fight it. And then the person who has relied upon the clip in a remixed documentary of the sort that Jeffery's team has created, they're gonna be told by the associate and give it up. What do you mean give it up? Statutory damages and serious trouble here. You need an insurance function. So I think legal defense and insurance could be married. And in fact, they're very complimentary aren't they? Because the more effective the legal review is, the more willing an insurance company would be to stand in back of the enterprise. Yeah. It's true in the ENO insurers in the patched together semi-private registry of scripts in the movie industry. So there are industries that absolutely need registries and in the absence of a genuine public one, I mean a governmental one, they've contrived their own one of those scripts in the movie industry and there's an insurance system that backs it up only because of the existence of the funding. Great, let John but jump in here. Seder, question back to you on this particular score. One of the things that you're asserting I think together is that certainty in this respect would be a good thing in the digital space. And though I support the idea, I wonder about some of the effects that the certainty might have. So one example would be to bring some law back in, I thought this is all about law. Think about the YouTube and Viacom case. So in the context of that case, one of the delicate issues was whether or not YouTube could rely upon the safe harbor in the DMCA section 512 and how much knowledge they could have of infringing material on their site and how much of an affirmative approach need they take relative to excluding materials that are subject to copyright in order to take advantage of the safe harbor. So I wonder just using that as one example but of course fair use broadly is yet another that with this higher level of certainty with respect to bits in fact preclude some things that one might like in the case of YouTube, innovation in the case of Jeffrey possibly fair uses which is obviously related only in so far as someone might not take advantage of rights that they had because of a perception that it was unlawful to do it in this particularly heightened space. Well if I get the question right, it highlights the fact that it's a variation on the proposition that comprehensive coverage is an impossible goal that even in the ideals of affairs there will be clarity as to some things you may do and some things you may not do with respect to a subset of cultural products but there will be many cultural products that remain uncertain and then there will be a boundary of things of materials even in the registry as to which you don't quite know what your rights are. Now this returns to Jeffrey's tactic. So Jeffrey is analogous, I'll assert, see if you agree, to Google. Jeffrey is a professor, now originally a professor at Harvard and those things together dramatically enhance his ability to take risks. And Google is the institutional analog. So Google buys YouTube and moves very aggressively in an environment that no other company could because of potential liability as an astronaut. And they are in the process of testing the boundaries of this unavoidable gray zone. So I think if Charlie's project was a worthy project as shrinking the gray zone you can't make it go away. So that in turn suggests a different role for the legal participants in this department. One role is you can think of it as analogous to the traditional function of legal aid bureaus and law schools which is case by case defense of individual clients. And closely analogous to defending the tenants against eviction by invoking a platform to another group. A different role for law firms or lawyers associated with law schools and so forth is more in the nature of test cases that would be associated with ventures like Google's or like Jeffrey's in which my goal is not to defend the status of this work. My goal is rather to move the boundary of a particularly important doctrine in a way that clarifies the freedom of people to make uses that are not authorized by their peer-to-division lawyers. So this in turn is one of the reasons why I persist in the argument that we've been having for a long time. Mainly the importance of retaining attention on that gray area and not limiting one's focus to the public domain. Because there's all this stuff, all this important stuff that we ought to labor to get as much freedom to use as possible. Otherwise we're gonna be producing Victorian studies or studies of the progressive Europe until the boundary. Prohibition, now alive. Next step, the depression. So now let me agree with you 100%. I don't even see where a difference has been between us on this. But let me take it in two steps. The first step is build the registry of the impeccably public domain. No uncertain borders. And recognize that what you're actually building when you're building that is a consortium of the great library institutions of the world advised by the great law firms of the world. That doesn't now exist. And that grouping of talents focused on the public domain is a new entry into the lists of how we will organize cyberspace. Now with that unit once in place, yes absolutely it is the next logical thing for any upstanding law firm to wanna do rather than just do defensive litigation against spurious claims, which we hope there won't be many because we so impeccably did it and we're insured anyway, will be affirmative litigation to push the boundaries of freedom. And yes, those parts of the edges of the public domain which are messed up, fair use. You and I have a discussion we still, I would still love to have with this audience about what fair use is and where it comes from and how to think about it. But I completely agree with you that an institutionally powerful, legally powerful organism of freedom set loose in the public domain to oppose litigation coming from the other side would be a huge plus, you're high. So that's actually a beautiful crystallization that I saw in Jeffrey's intervention here at last round of question, which is to say what is the greatest musical library for a moment ever created in human history? And one of the slides earlier, right? It was called Napster. It didn't come from institutions that were big and powerful and could actually push back. It came from illegality. Don't ask do, you said. And that carries through to the difference in design between extramurals, the Digital Public Library of America. It's the difference between designing something that has the plausible defensibility of not infringing because not copying. But nonetheless allows the curation of that which others can take on risks given their size and distribution to put on. Ignoring, real public domain, not real public, who cares? Can you get it? Can you rely on getting it? Can I, if I want a piece of music that my kids want to hear, can I rely on being able to go on YouTube and find a recording to be Armstrong playing this or the other? Sure. That's the public domain. What about illegality and anarchy as a core foundation of freedom? You and I have to have a conversation about law at some point. Can I just jump in, I'll piggyback just for a second on because this is also a pertinent example. The greatest archive of experiment, of sound, experimentation with sound as a medium is a website that some of you may be familiar playing Ubu Web. And when Kara and I were working on the mockup of the McLuhan, the recorded version of medium as the massage, it just happens today, of course, included this record because it was a strange kind of experiment. Like how would you turn a paper back into an LP recording? So we downloaded it to play around to break it, to chunk it up into sound files and so forth. And when we started putting it back together, we were sending out calls to the Ubu website and I just assumed, of course, Ubu Web. It's been there for 20 years now. It's the most complete collection in the world of experiments. Of course, they've obtained all the permissions. Well, of course, that turns out not to be the case. It's yet another example of how the Petrucci Library would be an interesting additional case. John, and then I'm gonna come to Ken and then I'm gonna open it up to everybody. Well, I was going in that direction too, which was one of the good bits of feedback we got last night was somebody who said, could we have a ladder into the conversation? Seems like, in fact, one of the ladders is here already in the question tool behind us. It's the conversation started during the context of extramurals and other digital humanities examples. And I think the basic underlying question was by virtue of your approach, which is wonderful in lots of ways, where you don't rely on, in fact, hosting the image, where you're merely pointing through to something, what's the prospect of broken links in this world? There's a variant of this that bedevils libraries consistently, which is the extent that we hurdle into this digital domain so quickly and rely upon formats that, like the DVD, may last for 10 years, right? Or five and a quarter and three and a half, whatever it might be, that we have to think a great deal about the interoperability of formats going into the future and so forth. And I think in particular, many of the projects that you have, particularly the one, the digital archive one, I was really thinking, what is the commitment that you and the team are making to the Japanese people who are relying upon those materials in a truly archival sense? Which is, is this that you're gonna keep it so long as this flavor of HTML works, or we like PDF or whatever it might be, or is there some other kind of a commitment that you're making behind it? And I think this does go to what kind of a system we're building when we think about this set of bits that we're constructing together. Are we trying to build something of utter permanence, something that might have the actuality of law behind it and big institutions that commit to reformat all the time in some fashion? Or are we trying to do something that might be, like Napster, available briefly and potentially wonderful and fleeting, right, in various respects? And it seems to me that question of permanence is one that brings these two sessions together and maybe if there are students who are anonymous in here who wanted to jump in, that might be a ladder in. All right, go ahead. Dick Ken. The part of Charlie's vision that bothers me is the armies of law firms for various reasons, one having been a litigator for 25 years. And it seems to me there's an intermediate ground between don't ask, just do, and that is do, but tell. And building into a notion of a safe harbor, instead of armies of law firms, I like safe harbors a lot better. So if you could enter into a safe harbor by telling, in other words, when you take something out, you're checking it out, you say what you're gonna do with it. And after some period of time, you're good to go. And the way that would have to work would be, if there were, you couldn't expect the owner to actually go look, but looking in the example of recordings, you've got ASCAP or all these, you've got these proxies for the owners. Who are in the business of looking out for the rights. So there would have to be some other entity like that that would do that, but anyway, that's my thought. Well, I don't disparage armies of lawyers. In fact, I feel we have a room full of lawyers who have been kind of looking for a role. And the idea of lawyers in support of the public domain seems to me to be a step in the direction that at least I feel and have felt since we started the Berkman Center that that's what we are. We're lawyers for the public domain, ultimately. We're lawyers for freedom. Seems like a good idea. Well, if there, okay. Maybe if there's a different venue, if we had a nice special venue for it, where it's with rules and limited damages. It's good resolution. We have to do this ourselves, Ken. It's like we, the people. All right, now, where, where, where, where? Right here. Yes, hit the button. Catch a little closer, so a little louder. You're talking about applying sort of principles of adverse possession to intellectual property. Is that, I just wanted to make sure that I understood sort of your perspective. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit more to that. No, it's more just, it's something in the gray area. And well, actually the adverse possession notion isn't a terrible way of characterizing it. But it's more just whether it's adverse possession or whether it's effectively characterizing it as a fair use, you know? As a technical matter, there is a contested but still often influential concept under the rubric of fair use called good fate. And manifestations of, you know, decent behavior by the defendant go a long way. And so, that would be a doctrinal cover for you. I wonder if there isn't another one, a doctrinal cover, which would be this notion, as I mentioned before, that libraries have special privileges under the Copyright Act. How does it strike you, the idea that we go ahead and scan the stuff anyway, with the knowledge that there will be some uses that are permitted by any library. And then, simply as a technological matter and legal, so through contract, then make plain to the libraries taking the material that they may only use it for these particular purposes. So I'm thinking in particular of section 108 and it's somewhat disputed, admittedly, set of protections and likewise the ability to render materials for the blind. And to start there and to have the permissions expand from there, as things get either clarified in the public domain, or if somebody has a good faith argument, a good faith argument that for a fair use, for instance, they might be able to take it and use it. So, it makes perfect sense. Here's a slight gloss on that. Peter Yazzie and Pat Afterheidy, a project with respect to documentary films. The idea was that they would clarify and push out the boundary of freedom through identification and articulation of custom. So they went around to a lot of documentary filmmakers and say, what do you understand to be the sets of activities with respect to copyrighted materials that you think ought to be and are, this is intentionally blurred, within the zone of permissible conduct as a documentary filmmaker. And they got a whole bunch of answers and they were remarkably convergent. And they published it as a set of best practices for fair use in documentary filmmaking. Notice, this was custom among the documentary filmmakers. They didn't ask the other side at all. Nevertheless, the shoulder to shoulder appearance of the documentary filmmakers has had a lot of oomph and errors and omission insurers who formerly would not warrant the legality of films that abided by these principles say, well, everybody's doing it, sure. We'll give you insurance policy. And armed with the insurance policy, the potential litigant said, well, fine, forget it. So it has been very effective in expanding the zone of opportunity. So generalizing it from this, the Harvard library has a lot of cloud on its own, but it would have a whole lot more cloud if it were allied with a group of libraries in the United States and other countries that said, okay, here's the zone and what we think is appropriate. And this portion is absolutely clear in section one. And then here is a little bit broader zone that comes within some of the other congested fields. This is the best set of activities that we think proper. So this would be the establishment of a enlarged set of opportunities, not through the registration and articulation of the status of the individual works, but through clarifying a band in the gray field. Lawyers would have some role on this, but the more important one would be to show their statement of principles by the library. And to be clear, wouldn't just be the gray field effective, but also the red field effective, right? So I'd like to abstract from that just up one level. And I regard Peter and Pat's project as just an elegant project that demonstrates the very idea that we need to help ourselves. It's not a matter of going to the legislature and imagining that somehow we're gonna put through some reform copyright legislation against the opposition of industry and everything else. The idea that we actually have capacities to build out this space, simply by exercising our collective connectivity in constructive ways, it's like, it's your highest penguin. It's like, we just need to apply it in this legal space to push out the bounds of freedom. And so I am wanting just to leave this with that thought in mind that as lawyers looking creatively at whatever the core is of this internet field and groping for the ways in which we're gonna find and protect freedom into the future, it's, I think, not likely to be a matter of reform legislation by old methods and lobbying activities and having to overcome Larry's corruption in order to get there. I think it's much more a matter of recognizing that we the people is a living concept. The idea that we the people of sovereign citizens is a living concept and that the essence of participation in the net is to recognize our sovereignty and our potential as contributors to make the space free within the environment of the real world in which we live. So thank you very much for joining in this and I look forward to lunch. Excellent. Thank you.