Thought leaders from libraries, academia, and civil society gathered at Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C., on June 23 to discuss how to best advance policies that improve the ease, affordability and equity in how people access knowledge in the digital age.
Convened by the Internet Archive, this workshop was designed as a continuation of a conversation that the public interest community, including Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Library Futures, and the Wikimedia Foundation, started last summer around building a better internet centered on public interest values.
While U.S. lawmakers’ focus on internet policy has largely been directed at reigning in the “Big Tech” commercial platforms, this workshop took a different approach. Rather than centering the challenges with today’s for-profit, commercial platforms, the workshop centered the barriers libraries face and potential opportunities for them to help solve challenges with our digital information ecosystem.
Our hope as organizers was that we could map the terrain, find common ground, and identify areas for further discussion. And even in a short amount of time, we were able to do that in spades. Here are a few of our key learnings, and what’s next.
Key Opportunities
Participants recognized that libraries could fill an important gap in the current online environment, as they have done for hundreds of years offline–indeed, providing free access to high quality, trusted information is libraries’ primary mission. As our information ecosystem becomes increasingly digital, the world often looks to libraries to do even more. For instance, scholar Joan Donovan has suggested that platform companies hire 10,000 librarians to help curate their services and support access to quality information. Others have suggested libraries could be doing fact checking, building and hosting social media networks, and more. One important way to combat misinformation is with better information provided by libraries; however, this is not without its challenges.
Key Barriers
Participants identified two significant barriers for full library participation in the digital information ecosystem as media consolidation and copyright overreach by powerful publishers. The group discussed a wide range of possible solutions to these challenges including antitrust scrutiny, contract preemption, supporting a robust public domain, controlled digital lending, and digital ownership.
The group was motivated by a desire to serve the public over commercial interests, and expressed their commitment to making sure equity was woven through all proposals in a thoughtful and authentic manner. Libraries support access to information and creative empowerment for all. We understand that a better internet must work for everyone, including underserved and vulnerable populations.
As the organizers of this event, we are very grateful to all the participants for contributing their time and expertise to this effort. Up next, we will hold virtual workshops to include additional members of the community in these discussions followed by the publication of a longer report with our findings and policy recommendations. Stay tuned for future updates as this effort moves forward.
At the December 2021 DWeb Meetup, dozens of booths gathered in gather.town for a fun, virtual, get-to-know-you holiday fair. There were 30+ booths of DWeb projects, foundations, start-ups, organizations and protocols sharing their vision for the decentralized web. Attendees were able to stroll through, chat, listen and learn from each other. Presenting projects came from every part of the world!
The Holiday Fair was inspired by the festive holiday fairs of Europe. They were an opportunity for participants to see what is happening in the DWeb space, learn about new technologies, find partners, supporters, team members or funding. Projects welcomed feedback and ideas, and explored opportunities for collaborating!
Booths present at the fair included:
Agregore, a minimal web browser for the distributed web. It integrates peer to peer protocols with the web to simplify creating and sharing apps without the internet. Its goal is to make local-first software easy to make, and to make technology more resilient and easier to make.
Anwen/Dweb Lab which is a DWeb content community exploring Dweb Lab, Dweb Search, Dwebverse: open-source mmo 3d and vr game.
Blue Link Labs & Paul Frazee which is developing a new project building a decentralized, self-hostable cloud using Hypercore Protocol and other Web3 technologies
Briar, a messaging app designed for activists, journalists, and anyone else who needs a safe, easy and robust way to communicate. Unlike traditional messaging apps, Briar doesn’t rely on a central server – messages are synchronized directly between the users’ devices.
Decentralized Future Council, a new initiative committed to educating policymakers in Washington about the future of decentralized and interoperable protocols that will transform the Internet as we know it.
Earthstar Project, a P2P protocol and accompanying library of APIs for building collaborative and social applications, designed for human-sized (1-100) groups that already know and trust each other. This project is ideal if you want an online space where you can just be yourself, someplace safe where strangers won’t hassle you, or a place to build tools that are really tailor-made for your community, with a simple, blockchain-free API.
eQualitie builds free and open source software on decentralized infrastructure and protocols in support of free speech and access to knowledge. It also showed its CENO (short for Censorship No!) Browser, a mobile browser for storing and sharing blocked web content, as well as the team’s newest project, OuiSync – a tool for securely synchronizing and sharing files. Both projects have been developed with the backend support of the open source Ouinet library for enabling peer-to-peer functionality, which can be integrated into many other third-party applications.
Filecoin Foundation presented about its grants program seeking to: A) Accelerate the adoption of open, decentralized technologies; B) Build communities of practitioners, users, and champions that are mutually supporting and self-sustaining; and C) Communicate the values and benefits of open, decentralized technologies to wider audiences
Fluence Labs, a peer-to-peer application platform which allows the creation of applications free of proprietary cloud providers or centralized APIs. Fluence provides a peer-to-peer development stack that allows for programming p2p applications, workflows, and compose services, APIs without relying on centralized intermediaries. Fluence’s p2p platform provides a complementary compute layer to IPFS, enabling a wide variety of decentralized use cases.
Handshake, a naming protocol that is backwards compatible with the existing DNS system. Every peer in the Handshake network cryptographically validates and manages the root zone, which completely removes the need for the Certificate Authority system (CAs). Names are logged on the Handshake blockchain, which is essentially one big distributed zone file to which anyone can add an entry.
The Hyper Hyper Space project aims to make decentralized applications easy to build and accessible by everyone. At the booth, participants could discuss how to power Dapps with data objects that can be instantiated anywhere (even inside a web browser), used offline and easily synchronized over the net!
ImageSnippets – discussing metadata delivery service layers around art/imagery within the context of decentralized protocols.
IndiView, a personal interest project in privacy which built an app and a decentralized network for communicating with friends and family. The network node is designed for self-hosting and implements a digital identity API. The mobile app supports sharing of contact details, photos, videos and chatting through the network.
The Internet Archive, the Library of Alexandria for the digital era, which is experimenting with storing web pages, film and audio in decentralized storage –at scale! Participants could meet team lead, Arkadiy Kukarkin.
Jolocom which is looking to empower every individual, organization, and entity capable of identity to freely communicate. Jolocom provides universally accessible and useful solutions for decentralized identity management.
Least Authority, a technology company supporting people’s right to privacy through security consulting and building secure solutions. A leader in the security of distributed systems, Least Authority offers consulting services, develops privacy-enhancing products, and contributes to the advancement of related open source and human rights projects.
Mask Network which aims to bridge the Web 2.0 users to Web 3.0 by bringing the decentralized application ecosystem onto traditional social networks, the Mask extension provides a decentralized option for features Web 2.0 users are familiar with. Users can enjoy secure, decentralized social messaging, payment networks, file storage, and file sharing without leaving mainstream social media networks.
The Matrix Foundation which is the Foundation responsible for the Matrix protocol and its healthy evolution. Matrix is a federated protocol which is mostly used for instant messaging, but not exclusively. One of the other applications is full mesh VoIP. They are investing into Matrix P2P as well to have portable identities, completely independent from servers, so people are in full control of their account.
Media Enterprise Design Lab, University of Colorado. Nathan Schneider’s CommunityRule is a governance toolkit for great communities. How does your community work? Are you ready to make hard decisions? Too often, we leave the most basic questions unstated and unanswered. CommunityRule makes it easier to clarify the basics so you can focus on other things. They showcased their prototype Web app and gathered ideas for the next-stage revision now in progress.
Mysterium Network, an open-source, Swiss-based Web3 project making the internet borderless and accessible for all. Their decentralised ecosystem of protocols, tools and web infrastructure provides more privacy, anonymous expression, and equal access to information. The project’s flagship product, the decentralised Mysterium VPN, is available for Android, Windows and Mac. Anyone can join the peer-to-peer marketplace to rent their unused bandwidth and IP address to a global community.
OneCommons, an early-stage startup dedicated to building a free and open cloud. The open-source platform lets you build, share and fork open cloud services that are location independent and support built-in funding mechanisms. Its mission is to realign economic incentives to nudge the Web away from the Attention Economy — based on maximizing a user’s attention at whatever cost — to an Intention Economy, where participants fund what they find worthy.
Peergos, a p2p, E2EE secure file storage, social network and application protocol built on IPFS. Peergos is building the next web – the private web, where end users are in control. Imagine web apps being secure by default and unable to track you. Imagine being able to control exactly what personal data each web app can see. Imagine never having to log in to an app ever again. You own your data and decide where it is stored and who can see it.
plan.tools, a community-centric content creator platform for collaboration, world building, and immersive experiences. PLAN is bridging together previously siloed industries using distributed ledger technology (DLT), p2p infrastructure, 3D graphics, open protocols, and realtime collaboration interfaces. Its vision is that the future internet will be powered by collaborative spaces built on a framework that is community-centric, off-grid capable, inclusive, as well as private and secure by default.
Quark, the browser that shows paths across the internet. It incentivizes the expansion of Web 3.0 to users at large with an interaction design approach. Imagine if you can bump into people looking at similar online content or search results, see where they’ve been, tag along to discover content together, and even monetize it via live stream. With Quark, you can build a collective map of the internet.
SHER, the decentralized live audio platform. That’s right, with SHER you can create your own shows. Have multiple streamers, play files and more. You don’t have to install anything, it works on your browser! Take the broadcast studio with you.
Skynet Labs, an open protocol for hosting data and web applications on the decentralized web using the Sia blockchain. Skynet decentralizes “the cloud” so that user and application data is not stored by (and only accessible to) a single, central authority and allows users to access it without any specialized software or cryptocurrency.
Socialroots enables functional cross-group communication, decreasing the time it takes to manage work and partnerships, and increasing engagement and productivity. Wicked Co-op LCA is an NSF funded worker owned co-op building enabling software technology for DAOs and decentralized networks of organizations to coordinate more effectively.
Starling Lab. The USC | Stanford Starling Lab is the first academic research center in the world dedicated to exploring how Web3 technology can transform human rights. They work with historians, journalists, lawyers to securely capture, store, and verify human history using decentralized technologies.
Sutty, a worker-owned cooperative developing a FLOSS platform for managing and hosting static websites and e-commerce. We work for and with NGOs and grass-root organizations in Latin America and we want to share with you why we think this is an opportunity for DWeb’s growth!
Virtual Chair facilitates the organization of efficient and effective virtual events by focusing on three priorities: interaction among participants, dissemination of materials, and broadening participation. With Virtual Chair, organizers can easily take full advantage of best practices for virtual events.
Webrecorder. Webrecorder’s goal is to make it easier for anyone to create, store and access web archives using open source tools. One of our current efforts, supported by the FIlecoin Foundation, is to standardize a format that can be used to create and render web archives directly in the browser. The format makes it possible to load web archives from IPFS as well as a local file system, or any online storage, decentralized or centralized. Webrecorder’s motto is “web archiving for all” and we are working on several tools to enable decentralized web archiving using the browser itself, allow anyone to create personalized archives of their own web browsing.
Visit GetDWeb.net to learn more about the decentralized web. You can also follow us on Twitter at @GetDWeb for ongoing updates.
At the November 2021 DWeb Meetup, we heard the latest from a range of projects across the DWeb ecosystem and from our featured speaker, Coraline Ada Ehmke, on what a DWeb built on the foundation of mutual respect, trust and equity would look like. You can watch the recording of the event and learn more about the speakers below. You can also read the chat stream that accompanied the discussion here.
In her powerful essay “The Sacred Geometry of Respect, Trust and Equity,” Ehmke suggests a new way forward. She challenges us to go beyond a begrudging nod to leveling the playing field. “To effect meaningful change, those whose authority and privilege are sustained by inequity must yield power and distribute agency to those who are most impacted by systemic disparities.”
At the meetup, Coraline discussed what it would mean to build a new decentralized web centered on the values of respect, trust and equity. She explored how centering the values of mutual respect, trust, and equity can help us address the challenges of promoting justice and human rights in the code we create.
Watch Coraline’s talk here:
Lightning Talk Speakers
Jenny Ryan
Jenny Ryan, Project Manager at eQualit.ie for the CENO Browser. enabling you to route around censorship with a peer-to-peer web browser. Jenny is passionate about connecting grassroots communities and global initiatives. She has co-founded and stewarded three Oakland, California nonprofits: Sudo Room, Omni Commons, and Sudo Mesh.
Watch Jenny’s talk here:
Eyal Ron
Eyal Ron, Co-founder of Esteroids, the search engine for dWebsites. Eyal received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Free University of Berlin. He was also a co-founder of Almonit (discontinued) and Alpress projects, a former member of the Bisq-core team, and the main author of a couple of DIN (German standard institute) blockchain specs.
Watch Eyal’s talk here:
Savannah Lee
Savannah Lee, Brand Director of Mysterium, an open-source Web3 project creating a censorship-resistant layer of the internet. She plugged into the Web 3.0 matrix four years ago, now focusing on R&D and strategies to grow P2P communities. Her goal is to help builders and users defend their digital rights and protect access to free information.
Watch Savannah’s talk here:
Mask.io
Suji Yan, Founder of Mask.io which is building a decentralized web on top of the current giant platforms. Mask helps protect users’ privacy on social media by encrypting users’ posts right before sending them out, so users control their data autonomy with their own keys.
Watch Suji’s talk here:
Mauve Signweaver
Mauve Signweaver, Creator of HyperGodot, a set of tools for the Godot game engine which enable developers to create local-first peer to peer games based on the protocol handlers in the Agregore browser. Mauve is a Canadian tech enthusiast with a passion for decentralization. Their main project for this is Agregore, a web browser that combines different peer to peer protocols together.
Watch Mauve’s talk here:
Joy Zhang
Joy Zhang
Joy Zhang, Founder of Quark. Quark is a Web 3.0 browser x social platform that shows you paths across the internet. Joy is an award-winning designer, engineer, and entrepreneur specializing in human-computer interaction. She has led projects at Apple, IDEO, and four early stage startups, two of which were her own. Joy was featured on Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards for her sustainable online shopping plugin, shADe.
Watch Joy’s talk here:
Bernhard Borges
Bernhard Borges, Ph.D, Research scientist at the Fluence Project. Fluence is a peer-to-peer application platform which allows the creation of applications free of proprietary cloud providers or centralized APIs. His areas of expertise are Web3, IoT, enterprise integration, and privacy. Prior to Fluence, Bernhard was the Chief Scientist.at Dock Systems and an IBM Distinguished Engineer.
Watch Bernhard’s talk here:
You can register to attend the Holiday fair on December 8, 2021 at 10am PT here.Visit GetDWeb.net to learn more about the decentralized web. You can also follow us on Twitter at @GetDWeb for ongoing updates.
The September 2021 DWeb Meetup explored the potential and reality of decentralized storage with two projects leading the way toward storing highly valuable cultural data at scale.
Watch the recording of the event and learn more about the speakers below.
The September 2021 DWeb meetup was held virtually on Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 10am PT, optimized for American/European time zones. Wendy Hanamura welcomed attendees and kicked off the meetup. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, set the stage for the discussion by emphasising the need for a more secure and decentralized web. The Meetup also broached the possibility of a DWeb camp in the Fall of 2022.
The discussion explained the differences between the IPFS and Filecoin systems, how they work together and delved into the two projects led by Arkadiy Kukarkin and Jonathan Dotan which are at the cutting edge of storing large scale data of high cultural significance in the Filecoin network. They discussed the challenges, successes, and future opportunities presented by these efforts.
Lastly, attendees welcomed Eseohe “Ese” Ojo, the new DWeb Projects Organizer and said farewell to Mai Ishikawa Sutton as she goes off to grad school in Japan. Mai will continue to stay connected with the DWeb community and can be reached on Twitter @maira. Ese can be reached at dweb@archive.org or on Twitter @EseoheOjo. The meetup wrapped up with socializing and networking in Gather.town.
The next DWeb Meetup “DWeb Meetup Nov 2021 – Centering Respect, Trust and Equity in the DWeb” is scheduled for Thursday, November 4, 2021 at 5pm PT, optimized for Asia time zones. At this meetup, we will hear the latest in the DWeb and from our featured speaker Coraline Ada Ehmke on centering respect, trust, and equity in the DWeb. You can read Coraline’s blog post on the DWeb principle of Mutual Respect here.
We’re interested in hearing from DWeb projects about the breakthroughs, challenges, and new roadmaps they might be exploring. For anyone interested in participating in lightning rounds at this meetup, let us know here.
Featured Speakers
Image of Arkadiy Kukarkin (Twitter: @parkan)
Arkadiy Kukarkin, DWeb engineer for the Internet Archive. Arkadiy explained this nonprofit’s history with decentralization, from BitTorrent to today. He is leading a new project to explore how the Internet Archive could better decentralize its historical archives using Filecoin. He’s starting with End-of-Term data — all US government websites as they appear at the end and beginning of each Presidential Administration — starting with the 2016-2017 transition. At this talk, Arkadiy revealed his roadmap, lessons learned, and future direction.
Image of Jonathan Dotan
Jonathan Dotan, Founder of the Starling Lab, the first major research lab devoted to Web3 technologies. It is affiliated with Stanford and USC. Jonathan returned to the DWeb Meetup to bring us up-to-date on the USC Shoah Foundation Project, which preserves testimony of survivors of genocide on decentralized storage at huge scale. How does the process work and how do we keep these precious artifacts safe.
Visit GetDWeb.net to learn more about the decentralized web. You can also follow us on Twitter at @GetDWeb for ongoing updates.
Don’t know how to celebrate the end of your quarantine? Come join us in commemorating the Re-Opening of California with a small-scale outdoor BBQ at the Internet Archive featuring music from the consciousness-expanding San Francisco Airship. FREE!
Please join us on June 14th at 11am PT for a virtual book talk with Richard Ovenden, about his book Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge, which has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.
Richard is joined by Abby Smith Rumsey, writer and historian, as they discuss the history of intentional recorded knowledge destruction. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A.
Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford, the senior executive officer of the Bodleian Libraries, a position he has held since 2014. His previous positions include Deputy Head of Rare Books at the National Library of Scotland, the Head of Special Collections and Director of Collections at the University of Edinburgh, and he held the Keepership of Special Collections at the Bodleian from 2003 to 2011, when he was made Deputy Librarian. He has been active in both the worlds of rare books and the history of photography, serving as Chairman of the Rare Books and Special Collections Group of CILIP, and Secretary of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography. He is currently a Trustee of the Kraszna Kraus Foundation, and of Chawton House Library. He is the author of John Thomson (1837–1921): Photographer (1997) and co-editor of A Radical’s Books: The Library Catalogue of Samuel Jeake of Rye (1999) and has contributed essays to the Cambridge History of Libraries, The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, and the History of Oxford University Press.
Abby Smith Rumsey is a writer and historian focusing on the creation, preservation, and use of the cultural record in all media. She writes and lectures widely on analog and digital preservation, online scholarship, the nature of evidence, the changing roles of libraries and archives, and the impact of new information technologies on perceptions of history, time, and identity. She is the author of When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future (2016). Rumsey served as director of the Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia and has advised universities and their research libraries on strategies to integrate digital information resources into existing collections and services. For over a decade, Rumsey worked with the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the development of a national strategy to identify, collect, and preserve digital content of long-term value.
REVIEWS:
“A call to arms to protect and preserve knowledge. A fine and moving book which ranges widely across time and acts as a reminder of the importance of libraries to our culture.” — Wolfson History Prize judges
“Essential reading for anyone concerned with libraries and what Ovenden outlines as their role in ‘the support of democracy, the rule of law and open society.”―Wall Street Journal
“[Burning the Books] takes a nightmare that haunts many of us―the notion of the past erased―and confirms that it is no fiction but rather a recurring reality. In the process, Ovenden stays true to his calling, reminding us that libraries and librarians are the keepers of humankind’s memories: without them, we don’t know who we are.”―Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian
“Chronicles how libraries have served as sanctuaries for knowledge under constant threat, and what that means for the present and the future…Shows that when knowledge in print is threatened by power, it’s people pledged to the printed page, rather than armies, who step in…Made clear to me just how vulnerable libraries really are. When we don’t properly fund them, we risk lies becoming the truth, and the truth becoming a joke.”―Slate
The Internet Archive has been partnering with libraries to digitize their collections for more than 15 years. Following a recent viral video featuring our book digitization efforts, and increased demands for e-resources, we’ve had renewed interest in our book scanning partnerships, with libraries wondering how we might be able to help them reach their patrons through digitization. Join scanning center managers Andrea Mills and Elizabeth MacLeod for a virtual event to learn about the ways in which the Internet Archive can help turn your print collections digital, and the impacts that these digital collections are having on remote learners.
Registration for the virtual event is free and open to the public. The live session is being offered twice to accommodate schedules and flexibility; if you are interested in joining, you only need to register for one session: March 24 @ 10am ET / 2pm GMT March 25 @ 1pm ET / 5pm GMT
Filmmakers responded with enthusiasm and creativity to a call from the Internet Archive to make short films using newly available content from 1925 in celebration of Public Domain Day. They discovered a new freedom in being able to remix film clips with Greta Garbo, magazine covers with flappers, and sheet music from standards like “Sweet Georgia Brown” – all downloadable for free and reusable without restriction.
For the contest, vintage images and sounds were woven into films of 2-3 minutes that conveyed a sense of whimsy, nostalgia, and humor. While some were abstract and others educational, they all showcased ingenuity and possibility when materials are openly available to the public.
“The Internet Archive has spent 24 years collecting and archiving content from around the world…now is the time to see what people can do with it,” said Amir Saber Esfahani, director of special arts projects at the Internet Archive. He was a judge in the December short-film contest along with Carey Hott, professor of art and design at the University of San Francisco, and Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive.
The judges reviewed 23 entries and chose a winner based on creativity, variety of 1925 content (including lists of all sources), and fit for the event (fun, interesting and captivating). These new creative works may also be available for reuse, as indicated by the license term selected by the creator.
First place: Danse des Aliénés
Joshua Curry, a digital artist from San Jose, won first place for his submission, Danse des Aliénés (Dance of the Insane), in which he layers pieces of film on three panes with images rising and falling music to “Dance Macabre” (Dance of Death) performed by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. The format was inspired by the poem dramatized in triptych in the short film In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea. His creation included flashes of Greta Garbo, ghosts from Koko Sees Spooks and colorful designs flowing in and out of the frames.
Curry, who has been making experimental videos since the 1980s, says the project was a perfect fit for his artist techniques, where he likes to stress and transform film in new ways. His film had a glitchy, broken feel that is in line with the aesthetic he often uses (See his other work at lucidbeaming.com.)
“I wanted it to be evocative and for people to appreciate it as a stand-alone piece of art,” says Curry, 49. “My visual goal was to produce something challenging that a wide variety of people could connect to – despite being mostly abstract and sourced from 95-year-old content.”
Filmmaker Joshua Curry.
While Curry’s studio is modern and full of electronic equipment, working with the 1925 content and hearing music with cartoonish voices making novelty, popping sounds their cheeks was a welcome break. “One day when I was choosing the music, I was driving around the city listening to songs and felt like I was transported back in time,” Curry says.
He says it was also a pleasure to have easy access to the public domain content without commercial gatekeeping or legal obstacles, which he often encounters with digital material he wants to remix. As it happens, Curry just completed a class in multimedia copyright. He says he works hard to operate within the rules because he wants his video creations to survive online and not be taken down because of copyright infringement allegations.
Having the works for this project in the public domain meant less time trying to get the content and more time to focus on the creative process. “It was like being a little kid who was told he couldn’t have cake and then one day saying: ‘Dive in!’,” Curry said of the access to the 1925 material in the Internet Archive.
Receiving the contest’s top honors was particularly meaningful, says Curry, because he works in Silicon Valley where the Internet Archive has “great nerd cred” and is a library that people revere.
“I was proud to win with weirdness,” Curry says. “My piece was abstract, without narration or titles, and an authentic tribute to the pioneering work of the experimental films I made use of.”
To learn more about Curry’s inspirations and to hear from him directly, watch the director’s commentary that was captured during the Public Domain Day event.
Arden Spivack-Teather, 12, and Sissel Ramierz, 13, both of San Francisco, won third place for their short film, Fashion of the 1920s. It traces the evolution of women’s clothing from tight-fitting styles that required corsets to drop-waisted, loose dresses popularized by flappers. “Women could finally be chic and comfortable at the same time,” the film notes. “Every time you notice a fabulous flowing frock, thank the 20s.”
Arden found out about the contest through her mom, Cari Spivack, a staff member at the Internet Archive, and decided to partner with her friend, Sissel, a classmate since kindergarten who she had collaborated with for a winning science fair project in fifth grade. On Zoom and FaceTime, the girls looked through old McCalls magazines and decided to focus on the changing style of women’s clothing.
From left, filmmakers Arden Spivack-Teather and Sissel Ramirez.
“It was really fun to use our creativity and find things that would look good together,” said Arden, who had never before made a film. Although the research, script and editing were a challenge, she says she hopes to do it again.
Spivack said she enjoyed seeing her daughter explore the material in the Archive, giggling and musing at the kitchen table about the tonics and ads she discovered. “It was exactly what I was hoping would happen — that they would be gripped by fascination of a time period that was long gone. They could travel back and learn on their own, paging through a magazine just like someone their age would have in 1925.”
The diversity of approaches people had with the films was impressive, added Spivack.
“It’s a good introduction to what can be done with old materials. You can use them to learn and to educate others. Or you can reuse them to make something that’s completely unexpected or never seen before,” Spivack said. “As archivists everything is important. But you don’t know why until you see what it can turn into or what it informs in the future.”
Honorable mentions
Yo Hey Look!by Adam Dziesinski, which pieced together film clips where something caught an actor’s eye, from a baby in a wicker stroller to a woman with a bob haircut dancing to a man in a Bowler hat laughing.
Michaela Giles made a time-lapse film of her using oil pastels, pencils, paints, and pens to draw a profile of a woman gracing the front of a vintage publication in 1925 Magazine Cover Recreation.
Public Domain Day by Subhashish Panigrahi explained the basics of how copyright works with text interspersed with cartoon clips, colorful paintings, and magazine covers.
25 Dad Jokes from 1925 by Anirvan Chatterjee was a compilation of jokes gathered from vintage middle school and high school yearbooks from Iowa, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oregon, California. Among the corny humor: “Why is the ocean so angry? It’s been crossed too many times,” and “What are the three most often words used in school? I don’t know.”
The films were shown at the December 17 Public Domain Day virtual party, where the creators were asked to discuss their projects in breakout room discussions. You can view a livestream of the event here.
The public domain is an invaluable component of our culture, allowing for the remixing, reinterpretation, and redistribution of designated works without restriction. On December 17th, we’ll be celebrating the works published in 1925 that will be moving into the public domain when the clock strikes midnight on January 1, 2021. Our virtual celebration is free and open to the public.
As part of our celebration, we’re bringing together leaders in the open world, intellectual property, and social justice to discuss the value of the public domain for creative expression and open scholarship, and provide perspectives on the marginalized communities that have been left out of the copyright system in the United States.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS
KEVIN J. GREENE, SOUTHWESTERN LAW A graduate of the Yale Law School and a veteran of the United States Marines, Professor Kevin J. Greene is the John J. Schumacher Chair Professor at Southwestern Law in Los Angeles, California. Professor Greene’s scholarship in the areas of copyright, trademark and publicity rights has garnered national and international recognition in the intellectual property (“IP”) arena, particularly his pioneering work on African-American music and copyright law.
JENNIFER JENKINS, CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN Jennifer Jenkins is a Clinical Professor of Law at Duke Law School and Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, where she writes its annual Public Domain Day website. She is the co-author (with James Boyle) of two comic books — Theft! A History of Music, a 2000-year history of musical borrowing and regulation, and Bound By Law?, a comic book about copyright, fair use and documentary film — as well as the open coursebook Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials (4th ed, 2018). Her articles include In Ambiguous Battle: The Promise (and Pathos) of Public Domain Day and Last Sale? Libraries’ Rights in the Digital Age. She is currently writing a book on “Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture” (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).
HEATHER JOSEPH, SPARC Since her appointment as SPARC’s Executive Director in 2005, Heather has focused the organization’s efforts on supporting the open and equitable sharing of digital articles, data, and educational resources. Under her stewardship, SPARC has become widely recognized as the leading international force for effective open access policies and practices. Among her many achievements, she convened the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and the Open Access Working Group, which provided critical advocacy for the establishment of the landmark 2008 NIH Public Access Policy and the 2013 White House Memorandum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research.
BREWSTER KAHLE, INTERNET ARCHIVE A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing Universal Access to All Knowledge. He is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. In 1989, Kahle created the Internet’s first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), later selling the company to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves petabytes of data – the books, Web pages, music, television, and software that form our cultural heritage.
KATHERINE MAHER, WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION Katherine Maher is the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects. She is a longtime advocate for free and open societies, and has lived and worked around the world leading the introduction of technology and innovation in human rights, good governance, and international development. Katherine has worked with UNICEF, the National Democratic Institute, the World Bank, and Access Now on programs supporting technologies for democratic participation, civic engagement, and open government. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on Human Rights and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow at the Truman National Security Project. She is on the Board of the American University of Beirut, and the Digital Public Library of America.
LATEEF MTIMA, INSTITUTE FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY & SOCIAL JUSTICE Lateef Mtima is the Founder and Director of IIPSJ; he is also a Professor of Law at the Howard University School of Law where he regularly teaches courses in intellectual property law and commercial law. Professor Mtima is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School. He has published numerous articles on copyright, publicity rights, and diversity in the legal profession, and is the editor of Intellectual Property, Social Justice, and Entrepreneurship: From Swords to Ploughshares (Edward Elgar 2015), and a co-author of Transnational Intellectual Property Law (West Academic Publishing 2015).
CATHERINE STIHLER OBE, CREATIVE COMMONS Catherine Stihler OBE is the CEO of Creative Commons. She has been an international champion for openness as a legislator and practitioner for over 20 years. After graduating from St Andrews University, she worked in the British House of Commons as a researcher before successfully standing for election as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Scotland in 1999, representing the UK Labour Party. In 2019, Catherine was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen in recognition of her services to politics. Catherine joined Creative Commons in 2020.
Rudolph Valentino stars in the 1925 film “The Eagle.” On January 1, 2021, this film and many more will enter the public domain.
What do the song “Sweet Georgia Brown,” The Great Gatsby and Rudolph Valentino in “The Eagle” all share in common? They were all first released in 1925. And looking ahead, that means that when the sun rises on 2021, thousands of works of literature, film, music and art will enter the public domain. We think having free access to these cultural riches is something to celebrate!
Please join us December 17th for a virtual celebration of the public domain. Presented by Internet Archive, Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Creative Commons, and SPARC, this event will bring together a diverse group of organizations, musicians, artists, activists, and thinkers to highlight the new works entering the public domain in 2021 and discuss those elements of knowledge and creativity that are too important to a healthy society to lock down with copyright law.
Our virtual celebration will be on December 17, 2020, at 3pm PT. Registration is free and open to the public.
Virginia Woolf’s classic, Mrs. Dalloway was first published in 1925. It enters the public domain on January 1, 2021.
The public domain is our shared cultural heritage, a near limitless trove of creativity that’s been reused, remixed, and reimagined over centuries to create new works of art and science. The public domain forms the building blocks of culture because these works are not restricted by copyright law. Generally, works come into the public domain when their copyright term expires. This year, works first published in 1925 are entering the public domain for all to share.
