oh no! Michael S Hart died!
Sep. 26th, 2011 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eOn the 6th of this month Michael S Hart died. I just now found out about it. What a sad and wasteful event. Michael Hart is the guy who started Project Gutenberg, the earliest, most successful, largest, most accessible, free ebook respository in the world.
He was an amazing person. Some say he invented the ebook. Certainly had the best vision for what ebooks could be. He worried about the divide of the haves and have-nots and realised, perhaps before anybody else, that access to knowledge is where this divide would be most dangerous. Accordingly he set about doing what he could to dissolve the knowledge divide by attempting to make the bulk of the world's knowledge available free of charge to whoever should want it. To a very large degree he succeeded. He began typing in ebooks himself, and went on to inspire a small army of volunteers to digitise out-of-copyright books and add them to Project Gutenberg's library.
He was a tireless campaigner against the push by corporate greed to wall off our inheritance from us. Each several years the big corporations push again to extend copyright further. It used to "protect" works for 7 years from original publication to allow creators to benefit from them and then to ensure they were freely available to society, thereby uplifting and enriching us all. It recognised that none of us work in a vacuum -- we each create things from what we have taken in from our culture. The sensible form of copyright recognised that and sought a sensible balance between the needs of all the creators in society. Now, of course, greedy, giant, powerful corporations have been poisoning this well from which we all drink. They have managed to change copyright to extend further and further, so that now it stretches to 50 years after the author's death in Australia -- 75 years after the author's death in USA!. It seems that their hope in doing so is to never again let any work slip into the public domain from the mid-1920s onward, inverting the original intention of copyright.
Hopefully Michael Hart's legacy will ensure that people can look back from the future and puzzle at how we could let culture become so perverted by a powerful few. I hope they will marvel at how someone with Michael Hart's vision could foresee a world where all humanity's knowledge was available to every person; a world where nobody could limit culture, and it was free to grow as fast and as freely as possible.
If you want to read his obituary it is at
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Michael_S._Hart
He was an amazing person. Some say he invented the ebook. Certainly had the best vision for what ebooks could be. He worried about the divide of the haves and have-nots and realised, perhaps before anybody else, that access to knowledge is where this divide would be most dangerous. Accordingly he set about doing what he could to dissolve the knowledge divide by attempting to make the bulk of the world's knowledge available free of charge to whoever should want it. To a very large degree he succeeded. He began typing in ebooks himself, and went on to inspire a small army of volunteers to digitise out-of-copyright books and add them to Project Gutenberg's library.
He was a tireless campaigner against the push by corporate greed to wall off our inheritance from us. Each several years the big corporations push again to extend copyright further. It used to "protect" works for 7 years from original publication to allow creators to benefit from them and then to ensure they were freely available to society, thereby uplifting and enriching us all. It recognised that none of us work in a vacuum -- we each create things from what we have taken in from our culture. The sensible form of copyright recognised that and sought a sensible balance between the needs of all the creators in society. Now, of course, greedy, giant, powerful corporations have been poisoning this well from which we all drink. They have managed to change copyright to extend further and further, so that now it stretches to 50 years after the author's death in Australia -- 75 years after the author's death in USA!. It seems that their hope in doing so is to never again let any work slip into the public domain from the mid-1920s onward, inverting the original intention of copyright.
Hopefully Michael Hart's legacy will ensure that people can look back from the future and puzzle at how we could let culture become so perverted by a powerful few. I hope they will marvel at how someone with Michael Hart's vision could foresee a world where all humanity's knowledge was available to every person; a world where nobody could limit culture, and it was free to grow as fast and as freely as possible.
If you want to read his obituary it is at
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Michael_S._Hart