The Internet Archive is hosting a FOIAPOLOOZA to celebrate Aaron Swartz and to provide a yearly showcase of his many interests. Aaron’s work focused on civic awareness and activism and we will spend Saturday together keeping his prescient vision alive.
Doors are open for the hackathon and the daytime programming on Saturday at 10 am. The reception will be on Saturday evening at 6:00 pm with the main program starting at 8 pm with a music and dance party afterward.
FOIAPALOOZA: Aaron filed many FOIA requests and inspired lots of journalists, including the now-legendary Jason Leopold, to use them as a tool for evidence-based journalism. So we decided to focus on FOIA and public records requests at this year’s San Francisco event. We aim to not only teach folks how to file their own requests but also to let them dig into the information we have received back from the 200+ requests we filed this last year with our Police Surveillance Project. FOIAPALOOZA speakers include Tracy Rosenberg & Mike Katz-McCabe from Oakland Privacy — an organization that just won an EFF Pioneer Award! — as well as Freddy Martinez from Lucy Parsons Labs, Ryan Shapiro from Property of the People and Brewster Kahle and Tracey Jaquith from the Internet Archive.
Saturday, November 9, 2019 10:00 am Doors Open for Hackathon and Daytime Programming 11:00 am Programming starts 6:00 pm Reception 8:00 pm Evening Program
Internet Archive 300 Funston Avenue San Francisco, CA 94118
Our job is providing ‘Universal Access to All Knowledge.’ Knowledge comes from many places. Explore. Enjoy. Leave your mark. —Brewster Kahle, Founder & Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
We invite you to join us for the Internet Archive’s biggest bash of the year: World Night Market, Wednesday, October 23, 5-10 PM. We’ll be closing the street and throwing a block party for our friends, neighbors and partners to celebrate our impact with partners around the world.
When you arrive from
5- 7 pm, we will give you your Passport to food trucks with our favorite
foods from Singapore to Mexico City to Delhi; beer & wines from around the
world; Lion Dancers and music, playful tattoos, plus hands-on demonstrations of
the Internet Archive’s latest innovations and partnerships.
Stamp your Passport to Knowledge at these demo stations:
Get your own passport when your check in, then be sure to collect the stamps at every station
Put on a VR headset and play in a virtual Archive or try out vintage games
Enter a Virtual Reality Archive where you can spin an LP, read a book, or watch a film.
Internet Archive engineer, Mek Karpeles, shows off the latest features of OpenLibrary.org
Then from 7-8 PM the Great Room program begins! In a world in which truth seems to be fracturing, what’s a library’s role? To weave the trusted knowledge held by libraries into the World Wide Web itself. We’ve invited our partners and builders to share their herculean efforts to make media more accessible and reliable than ever.
You won’t want to miss:
Brewster Kahle at the October 2018 Annual Bash
Information
Activist, Carl Malamud on freeing the information of India
Open
Access visionary, Lisa Petrides on building an diverse, inclusive, and equitable
Universal K-12 School Library for all
Internet
Archive’s Alexis Rossi & Jason Buckner on making talk & news radio
searchable, comparable and ultimately, accountable
Brewster
Kahle on our project with Wikimedia
Foundation to take readers deeper and ensure the integrity of the world’s
online encyclopedia
Plus the
Internet Archive Hero Award and a
major announcement about our future direction
And after the program, be sure to stay for the dancing, DJs and dessert on our side patio.
Having knowledge you can trust has never been more important. So let’s celebrate— get your passport now to the World Night Market!
On October 23rd, you won’t have to travel to Singapore or Taipei to enjoy a night market of food, fun, and friends.
Archive staffer Mark Caranza demonstrates the latest tools to a global community of library patrons.
This October, the Internet Archive is going global and we invite you to join us for World Night Market, Wednesday, October 23rdfrom 5-9 PM at our headquarters in San Francisco. This annual bash is your passport to explore the Internet Archive’s global offerings, from world news to sacred palm leaf manuscripts. Inspired by the night markets of Asia, we’ll be throwing a block party for friends, partners and our community, offering up a vibrant mix of food trucks, hands-on demo stations, music and dancing. Then, from 7-8 PM, head up to the Great Room for presentations to unveil our latest tools and biggest partnerships from around the world.
Internet Archive Founder, Brewster Kahle welcoming guests at 2018’s annual bash
Bring the family! Lots of hands-on activities for the young at heart.
SAVE THE DATE:
Date: Wednesday, October 23rd Location: Internet Archive HQ, 300 Funston Ave, San Francisco Time: 5pm till 9pm
Tickets: available through Eventbrite in early September.
We’re looking for volunteers! Are you an artist who wants to help us build a night market? Do you love climbing ladders and hanging twinkle lights? Or do you fancy yourself an expert beer and wine server? Our events are always powered by our incredible community—we couldn’t do it without you. If you would like to get involved, please email: volunteer@archive.org.
On October 23rd, let’s celebrate the Internet Archive’s mission to preseve the world’s cultures, languages and media, while serving global communities with free access to the great works of humankind.
Open Library engineer, Mek Karpeles, demonstrates the latest features of openlibrary.org
Join us on June 18, 2019 at the the Internet Archive for a book reading and panel discussion about — and with — some of the original hacking supergroup, the Cult of the Dead Cow. Modern security owes much to this irreverent group, whose members pioneered both smart independent security research and hacking for human rights.
The event is in celebration of the new book by veteran technology reporter, Joseph Menn, entitled Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World. Light refreshments and small snacks will be provided, and books will be available for purchase. Tickets are free, but donations are greatly appreciated. The event will also be live-streamed on our YouTube channel.
Speaker: Joseph Menn – author of Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
Panel: MC: Cindy Cohn – Executive Director of EFF Chris Rioux – BO2k (Back Orifice 2000) author and Veracode founder Window Snyder – cDc fellow traveler and former core security staffer at Microsoft and Apple and now Square Omega – formerly anonymous cDc text file editor
On November 4, 1979 Marion Stokes began systematically video taping television news and continued for more than 33 years, until the day she died. The Internet Archive is now home to the unique 71k+ video cassette collection and is endeavoring to help make sure it is digitized and made available online to everyone, forever, for free.
Ms. Stokes was a fiercely private African American social justice champion, librarian, political radical, TV producer, feminist, Apple Computer super-fan and collector like few others. Her life and idiosyncratic passions are sensitively explored in the exceedingly well reviewed new documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, by Matt Wolf. Having premiered last month at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, the film is on tour and will be featured at San Francisco’s Indefest, June 8th & 10th. For those in the Bay Area, please consider joining Internet Archive staff and leadership at the 7:00pm June 10th screening. Advance tickets are available now, seating is limited.
Long before many questioned the media’s motivations and recognized the insidious intentional spread of disinformation, Ms. Stokes was alarmed. In a private herculean effort, she took on the challenge of independently preserving the news record of her times in its most pervasive and persuasive form – TV.
Background Materials, Resources & Reviews
Input Marion Stokes and her future husband John Stokes appear in and helped produce Input, a weekly panel discussion series on the CBS affiliate in Philadelphia that ran from 1968 through early 1971. It addressed a remarkable range of timely social topics, some far ahead of their time. Panelists included diverse thoughtful scholars, activists, clergy and others. Some had already made recognized accomplishments. And some would only later make their profound contributions to civil rights and social justice.
Pete Seeger was already a well known political folk singer when he appeared in February 1970 on a panel with a prison warden and recently released inmates discussing the nature of incarceration and criminal justice reform. Here he is sharing his song “Walking Down Death Row” on the program.
John Fryer was a Philadelphia psychiatrist. Here he is on Input in January 1968 discussing contradictory social norms. Five years later, Dr. Fryer would give a speech, in disguise, at the American Psychiatric Association annual convention. Introduced as Dr. Anonymous, he announced “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist. I am a member of the APA,” He went on to decry the prejudice directed toward gay people by the Association and social institutions. Dr. Fryer’s brave and bold call for reform is credited as galvanizing his peers in 1973 to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
William Davidon was professor of Physics at Haverford College. Here he is in a December 1968 Input episode, discussing the nature of television as a means of manipulating an uninformed public. 27 months later he would take an action of great social consequence and his role would remain secret for the next 43 years. In 2014, the book The Burglary posthumously revealed Dr. Davidon as the leader of a group that in 1971 broke into the FBI field office in Media, PA. They were never caught. The 8-member team stole, and released to the press, an enormous trove of documents that revealed COINTELPRO. It was the FBI’s then 15-year long covert, and often illegal, domestic surveillance program to disrupt, discredit and destroy American civil rights, anti-war and other social activist organizations and leaders. Included in the documents was evidence of the FBI’s attempt to induce, via blackmail, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide. The release of the papers lead to significant additional revelations by journalists and Congressional investigations, which prompted substantial reform.
Personal Journals Ms. Stokes was a committed diarist, note taker and list maker. Under the leadership of archivist Jackie Jay, The Internet Archive has been digitizing the contents of 55 bankers boxes of her papers that include her personal journals, magazines, newspapers, civic organization pamphlets, leaflets and handbills. Some of her earliest (1960 & 1961) hand-written journal entries are now publicly available and can be viewed here. More will be added as they are scanned and QC’d.
“Matt Wolf’s remarkable Recorder uses Stokes’ recording obsession as a way to explore both Stokes herself and the world she literally committed to video tape. The results are fascinating, weird, and often quite moving.” – Indiewire
“Intriguing from first minute to last… Relating this stranger-than-fiction tale with the narrative twists and turns of a well-paced thriller, Recorder will make news junkies feel a lot better about themselves.” – Hollywood Reporter
“One outstanding offering in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival is Recorder, which reveals the secret greatness of a reclusive activist… An information revolutionary, Stokes, despite her decades of isolation, touched the nerve center of the times.” – The New Yorker
“Recorder is more than just a portrait of a woman’s complicated relationships and obsessions… Recorder quietly seeds damning observations about the ways media narratives are formed, and how the shapers of these narratives distort the truth and our worldview.” – Flixist
“Stokes’s archival work is unprecedented; a time machine back to the advent of the 24-hour news cycle covering historical and cultural events that otherwise would have been overlooked” – The Outline
“But Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is not just — or even predominantly — an essay film about the media. What makes the documentary so fascinating is the parallel it draws between restoring an archive and retrieving a life.” – Filmmaker Magazine
“…rarely do we experience the passion and purpose of a methodical collector, who really made a difference. Matt Wolf’s masterful documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project takes us into the visionary psychic and cluttered physical worlds of a woman who turned her acquiring fury into a unique archive of contemporary history.” – Helen Highly
“But maybe the real value of the Marion Stokes Project is that starting close to 20 years before the digital age, it reveals how the news was going to evolve into an addiction, one that had the power to displace whatever subject it was ostensibly about. For even if you’re obsessed with the inaccuracy of TV news, it has still entrapped you, like a two-way mirror that won’t let you see the other side.” – Variety
“The story of Marion Stokes inspires and challenges us to consider our world and the legacy we can create through dedication to our own ideals and principals.” – 2019 Maryland Film Festival
“Recorder: The Marion Stokes Projectmanages to capsulize Stokes’ efforts and present them as a springboard for a greater conversation on the societal effects of the media, and what we can accomplish given the right resources and individual determination.” – Film Threat
“Data, it is said, is the new oil. A woman named Marion Stokes knew this early on and believed that freedom was inextricably linked to data and facts because with it one can make informed decisions. So she took what is seen as a curious and radical approach to feverishly create massive archives of what used to be the prime source of such data, television news, in a time when no one else would.“ – Forbes
“This story is beautifully told, inspiring, and is a constant reminder that everything we hear is not always the whole truth.” – Irish Film Critic
“Much like Stokes’ archives, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is a cautionary reminder that, now more than ever, we need to be scrutinizing who is shaping the breaking news we consume.” Cinema Axis
“Marion had fought a quixotic but worthy battle against the tyranny of transience.” – New Statesman
Politics got you down? Looking for a new way to digest ethical quandaries? Feeling like you need some laughter in your life? Have we got the event for you! Come join us at the Internet Archive for an Ethics In Technology – Community Night and Comedy Show, presented by former Amazon executive and entrepreneur Vahid Razavi, author of “Ethics in Tech, or The Lack There of and Age of Nepotism“.
Enjoy cutting edge performances by a tour de force group of comediennes; Francesca Fiorentini, Chloe McGovern, Annette Mullaney and Abigail See.
In addition, Brett Wilkins will be presenting: Bugsplat: Can Technology Really Make War Less Deadly for Civilians? There will be a showing of the film “Drone” directed by Tonje Hessen and Bob Chandra will give a short talk on the commercialization of military weapons.
Join us for the first ever DWeb Camp at a private farm one hour south of San Francisco.
How do we build a better Web? The Web we want, the Web we deserve? A Web with no central points of control?
Since 2016, we’ve been calling this the Decentralized Web (DWeb for short) and now we are inviting everyone who wants to imagine and co-create that better Web to join us this summer at one of the most beautiful spots on Earth.
The Internet Archive is hosting a community-built event: DWeb Campfrom July 18-21, 2019. Or come early and stay late if you want to help build the camp with us: July 15-22, because that’s when the fun begins. DWeb Camp is all about connecting: to your deepest values, to the community around you, and to the planet. Can we come together to imagine and co-create the technologies, laws, markets and values for the societies we want to live in? REGISTER NOW to attend this first-of-its-kind-event.
We’ll be camping at a farm that’s just a ten-minute hike to this beach, with streams, forests, and trails all around the adjacent private property.
WHERE: We’ve reserved a private farm one hour south of San Francisco and one hour west of San Jose. It’s surrounded by 600 acres of pristine, untouched coastal land: beach, forest, stream. Once you register, we’ll send you the exact location.
The Farm will rent you a bell tent, cots, and bedding if you don’t have gear of your own.
HOW WILL IT WORK: bring a tent and sleeping gear, or if you need one, you can rent a tent and bedding from the Farm and they’ll have it set up for you when you arrive. These 5-meter bell tents are big enough for 3-4 people, so invite your friends and share. RVs are welcome too.
All your meals will be covered in the cost of your ticket: healthy, locally-sourced food, some grown on the Farm itself. You should plan to bring all the extras: snacks, drinks, wine, s’mores, coffee. We won’t be serving alcohol, but it’s BYOB. Bring enough to share! We’ll set up some DIY coffee/tea bars, or you can set up a tent and host your own lounge.
Galileo Kumavais builds his first decentralized city at the Decentralized Web Summit 2018.
WHO’S INVITED: DWeb Camp is family-friendly, so you can bring the kids. For the kid in all of us there will be plenty to do from morning yoga, picking berries, watching the sunset on the beach, hiking up a local stream—plus we’ll have kid-friendly activities going on as well. But every child under 18 needs to be accompanied by a parent at all times—no babysitting provided.
Are you a coder, lawyer, artist, activist, armchair philosopher or all of the above, working to create new ways to connect to and through technology? Ready to get your hands dirty and build something new from the ground up? Love to camp, cook, hack, hike, and connect with the great outdoors? Then DWeb Camp may be for you.
Since we’re still working out the kinks, we will be limiting DWeb Camp to 500 people this first year. Sorry, but that means no daytrippers, latecomers, or unregistered drop-ns allowed.
The Farm has a variety of structures to adapt, share, and co-create within. From 44′ domes, a dance floor, and workshop rooms to raw spaces we can shape together.
WHAT’S THE GAME PLAN? DWeb Camp is a community-built event, so it will be what you make it. We supply the land, some shelter, nourishing food, power and the rest is up to you.
We hope you’ll bring your own project, share your knowledge, launch a conversation, host a tea lounge, offer massages, lead a creative class. The sky’s the limit. Enlist your friends to come and help. Members of the Farm will be creating spaces for meditation, yoga, music making, nature walks, beach hikes, regenerative farming, star gazing, and more.
Imagine what you could build in here?
The Farm has limited connectivity to the internet and little to no cell service. Volunteer teams are setting up a local mesh network throughout the Farm so we can communicate and work offline with the decentralized tools you bring. We’re looking for DWeb communities to build services on top of the mesh.
Why is this important? Because a truly Decentralized Web would work in places where there is limited to no internet connectivity or restrictions due to cost or censorship. The DWeb Camp is a perfect opportunity for us to make local messaging, mapping, websites, and file storage work with community-managed infrastructures in the wild, where we can all be builders and users of our decentralized technologies. Visit our Mesh@DWeb Camp GitHub to get involved now!
HOW CAN I CONTRIBUTE? Here are the GitHub repositories where we hope to co-organize DWeb Camp with you! Our goal is to make this a volunteer-run event in the future and leave behind a trove of knowledge for others. If you prefer to share information in places other than GitHub, we’ll be publishing a new website with more information in mid-April, and in the meantime, you can always email us at dwebcamp@archive.org with your ideas!
By mid-April, we’ll have a process in place where you can see some of the projects that others are proposing and find ways to pitch in. Better yet: propose your own! Our goal as organizers is to make sure you have a place to land to create magic—but you’ll need to bring just about everything else, just like when you camp!
WHAT KIND OF ENVIRONMENT CAN I EXPECT? The environment is beautiful but raw. California’s northern coast is often shrouded in fog, with temperatures ranging from 72 to 53 degrees. Natives of this area say it never rains here in July, but don’t expect to be diving into the ocean without a wetsuit! You’ll want to bring layers of clothing, and shoes suitable for hiking.
HOW MUCH WILL IT COST? The true cost for this 4-day camp is $800 per person. We know that’s a lot of money for some, and not that much for others, so we’ll be offering a sliding scale to register, from $200 for students to $1200 for highly resourced professionals who want to sponsor someone else. Kids under 12 come for free.
There will be some limited financial aid and a committee will evaluate each person on the basis of need.
The Farm is also renting 5-meter canvas bell tents with cots and bedding for $400. Put together a group and share! There’s a $100 parking fee if you want to bring your RV.
(For the ultimate non-camper, there is a lodge with suites, cabins, and glamping tents just ten minutes away. But you’ll have to make arrangements on your own.)
WHAT IF I VOLUNTEER? Volunteers who work three 4-hour shifts (12 hours) during the Camp can qualify for a 50% rebate on their ticket price. Those who come for the Build/Strike days (July 15-22) and contribute three 8-hour shifts (24 hours) can qualify for a 100% rebate. Volunteer slots are limited and we’ll post a way to apply in mid-April.
What will happen when you put 500 committed people in a beautiful, natural, ocean-front space? We hope to leave you inspired. Recharged. Connected. Grounded. Ready to change the world.
Internet Archive is excited to present the 13th annual event in Rick Prelinger’s series of LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO, which just filled the Castro Theater for two nights in December.
Combining favorites from past years with this year’s footage discoveries, this feature-length program shows San Francisco’s neighborhoods, infrastructures, celebrations and people from the early 20th century through the 1970s.
New sequences this year include a spoof of San Francisco’s advertising industry in 1953; Native activists riding a boat to the Alcatraz occupation; family life in the Crocker-Amazon district; a hilarious film promoting the new Union Square Garage; men walking cables on the unfinished Bay Bridge; African American tourists in 1970 SF; elementary-school students doing science projects in 1957, the Year of Sputnik; surreal parade floats on Market Street; the Human Be-In in 1966; a whirlwind ride down Geary Boulevard, 1968; model rockets in Ingleside Terrace; the Stoneson organization building houses in 1941; a 1930s Japanese American family living atop a semi-rural Rincon Hill; and much, much more.
AND, FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER: a short subject precedes the show: the world theatrical premiere of a new high-resolution scan of the legendary pre-quake film A TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET BEFORE THE FIRE (filmed April 1906) made from the best existing material, showing detail that no audience has seen in over one hundred years. As always, the audience makes the soundtrack! Come prepared to identify places, people and events, to ask questions and to engage in spirited real-time repartee with fellow audience members.
Monday, January 7 Doors Open and Reception Starts: 6:30pm Show Begins: 7:30pm
Tickets: Sliding scale starting at $15, but no one turned away for lack of funds.
Internet Archive
300 Funston Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94118
We live in a world that is full of algorithms. We have an unconscious relationship to code and numbers. Even creativity is now quantified by data. — DJ Spooky
The Internet Archive is pleased to announce that tickets are now on sale for the World Premiere of DJ Spooky’s QUANTOPIA: THE EVOLUTION OF THE INTERNET—a multimedia hip hop concert experience about the history and exponential growth of the Internet. This new work commissioned by the Internet Archive, created with funding from a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is set to premiere at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater on Friday, January 25, 2019 at 7:30pm.
What might the Internet sound like? How can we visualize the Internet? Is an algorithm merely an opinion clothed in mathematics?
According to DJ Spooky and his collaborator and data artist Greg Niemeyer, QUANTOPIA is “The utopia of quantification —the dream that we can count, measure, and weigh everything and reach a perfect understanding of the world despite its paradoxes.”
DJ Spooky’s QUANTOPIA: THE EVOLUTION OF THE INTERNET weaves together new compositions, chorus, a string quartet and algorithmically generated images in an immersive aural and visual experience. Described by the composer as an “acoustic portrait of the Internet,” DJ Spooky will perform live loops and layers of sound, alongside musicians from Classical Revolution and San Francisco Girls Chorus, enveloped by data visualization and interactive video design by Greg Niemeyer, with additional visual design created by MEDIUMLABS, and Roger Antonsen.
“Quantopia” Network Visualization by Roger Antonsen
QUANTOPIA commemorates the 50th anniversary of the first sound transmission on the Internet. On October 29, 1969, two young programmers working together by phone attempted to “LOGIN” from the UCLA computer lab to a Stanford Research Institute computer. The system crashed, but with those two momentous keystrokes, “L-O,” the world would never be the same. The ARPANET, precursor to the Internet, was born. Fifty years later, with the Internet’s complete transformation of society, there is a growing sense that technology and humanity are at a crossroad. Traveling through a barcode forest, the audience will witness fifty years, from 1969 to 2019, to consider the social and technical co-construction of the Internet, from the world of big data to information theory.
QUANTOPIA will be presented in three movements and features text from the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and progresses through the creation and expansion of the World Wide Web. The hour-long experience is a multi-sensory journey illuminating ever-present issues of inclusion and exclusion, echo chambers and small-world phenomena. A celebration of the history of the Internet, QUANTOPIA is a tribute to the depth and high stakes of free speech and creative expression involved in our daily use of media.
QUANTOPIA is the first public performance of the Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This project also represents an artistic extension of the Internet Archive’s work in preservation, open technology, and open access to knowledge. “The idea is having a symphony about the web,” reflects Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. “Can we go and learn from that in new and different ways what this Internet thing is?” By leveraging the power of music, the Internet Archive seeks to engage new and younger audiences to think about how they engage with the internet. On the day of the premiere, students from selected programs in the San Francisco Unified School District and the wider Bay Area will attend a special educational presentation at YBCA.
We look forward to seeing our Internet Archive community at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on January 25th at 7.30pm.
QUANTOPIA is commissioned by the Internet Archive, created with funding from a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and presented in association with YBCA. Produced by Sozo Artists, Inc. with additional support from Sozo Impact, Inc.
Screen shot from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent classic, “The Ten Commandments.” On January 1, 2019, this film and tens of thousands of other works will enter the public domain.
It’s time to celebrate! For the first time in decades, new creative works such as Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent film, “The Ten Commandments,” Kahlil Gibran’s classic “The Prophet,” and Virginia Woolf’s third novel, “Jacob’s Room,” will enter the public domain on the first day of 2019. Please join us for a Grand Re-opening of the Public Domain, featuring a keynote address by Creative Commons’ founder, Lawrence Lessig, on January 25, 2019. Co-hosted by the Internet Archive and Creative Commons, this celebration will feature legal thought leaders, lightning talks, demos, and the chance to play with these new public domain works. The event will take place at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.
Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” will enter the public domain on January 1st!
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. But U.S. copyright law has greatly expanded over time, so that now many works don’t enter the public domain for a hundred years or more. Ever since the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, no new works have entered the public domain (well, none due to copyright expiration). But for the first time this January, tens of thousands of books, films, visual art, sheet music, and plays published in 1923 will be free of intellectual property restrictions, and anyone can use them for any purpose at all.
The cartoons featuring Felix the Cat, 1923, is among the tens of thousands of works that will be full accessible starting 2019.
Join the creative, legal, library, and advocacy communities plus an amazing lineup of people who will highlight the significance of this new class of public domain works. Presenters include Larry Lessig, political activist and Harvard Law professor; Corynne McSherry, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Cory Doctorow, science fiction author and co-editor of Boing Boing; Pam Samuelson, copyright scholar; and Jamie Boyle, the man who literally wrote the book on the public domain, and many others.
Continue the celebration at the world premiere of DJ Spooky’s “Quantopia” at the Yerba Buena Center in SF on January 25.
In the evening, the celebration continues as we transition to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the world premiere of Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky’s Quantopia: The Evolution of the Internet, a live concert synthesizing data and art, both original and public domain materials, in tribute to the depth and high stakes of free speech and creative expression involved in our daily use of media. Attendees of our Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain event will receive an Internet Archive code for a 20% discount for tickets to Quantopia.
If you’d like to support the work we do at the Internet Archive, including making these 1923 works available to you for free on January 1,
10-11:45am: Interactive public domain demos and project stations with organizations including Creative Commons, Internet Archive, Wikipedia, Authors Alliance, Electronic Frontier Foundation, California Digital Library, Center for the Study of the Public Domain, LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Cleveland Art Museum, and many more!
11:45-1pm: Lunch on your own in the Richmond District
1pm-6pm: Program of keynote speakers, lightning talks and panels highlighting the value and importance of the public domain
6pm-7:30pm: Reception
Speakers/Panelists Include:
Lawrence Lessig – Harvard Law Professor
Cory Doctorow – Author & Co-editor, Boing-Boing
Pam Samuelson – Berkeley Law Professor
Paul Soulellis – Artist & Rhode Island School of Design Professor
Jamie Boyle – Duke Law Professor & Founder, Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Brewster Kahle – Founder & Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
Corynne McSherry – Legal Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Ryan Merkley – CEO, Creative Commons
Jennifer Urban – Berkeley Law Professor
Joseph C. Gratz – Partner, Durie Tangri
Jane Park – Director of Product and Research, Creative Commons
Cheyenne Hohman – Director, Free Music Archive
Ben Vershbow – Director, Community Programs, Wikimedia
Jennifer Jenkins – Director, Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Rick Prelinger – Founder, Prelinger Archives
Amy Mason – LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Paul Keller – Communia Association
Michael Wolfe – Duke Lecturing Fellow, Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Daniel Schacht – Co-chair of the Intellectual Property Practice Group, Donahue Fitzgerald LLP
