The recently released video game documentary High Score includes a sequence in the third episode about a game called GayBlade. GayBlade is one of the first commercially-sold LGTBQ-themed video games, a role-playing romp for Windows and Macintosh occasionally referred to as “Dungeons and Drag Queens”. Once thought to have been lost, the game’s software was recently discovered and preserved—and is now available in the Internet Archive!
Although LGTBQ people have been creating video games since the earliest days of the industry, there were very few games before the 21st century that explicitly had LGTBQ themes. Game creator Ryan Best hoped to change that with GayBlade, remarking, “This game gives lesbians and gays—and straight people—a chance to strike back at homophobia from behind our computer screen.”
The game is definitely political, racy and unafraid to make waves, as it definitely did in 1992 when it was released. Players are tasked with exploring a deep dungeon filled with homophobic enemies, trying to rescue the Empress Nelda and return her to Castle GayKeep. Best (and co-creator John Theurer) filled the game with humorous spells, items and antagonists while still keeping it all within the traditional role-playing genre. There are over 13 levels and 1,300 different rooms in this dungeon, reflecting the remarkable amount of work put into it by its creators—truly a unique work of art.
After being lost in a move from Honolulu to San Francisco, the game was thought to have disappeared forever. In High Score, creator Ryan Best laments that he was unable to find any of the game files, and was not very hopeful he would ever find them. But that’s not the end of the story—between the close of filming and the release of the documentary, Best discovered another copy of his game. Thanks to efforts by the LGTBQ Game Archive, Strong Museum of Play, and Internet Archive, it was preserved.
If you want to experience GayBlade for yourself, it’s available in our emulated games collection. You can play it directly in your browser if you’d like, or download the original source code. Additionally, an even earlier LGTBQ game called Caper In The Castro, a mystery adventure dating to 1989, is also emulated in the archive. So hit play and take a look at a little-known slice of LGTBQ history!
On July 22, 2020, Kyle K. Courtney, Copyright Advisor at Harvard University, spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit against the Internet Archive brought by the publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House.He holds a J.D. with distinction in Intellectual Property Law and a Master of Science in Library and Information Science (MSLIS) degree. Courtney is a published author and nationally recognized speaker on the topics of copyright, technology, libraries, and the law.These are his remarks:
Part of my work in scholarship is about the roles of copyright and the library landscape. I wrote the white paper on Controlled Digital Lending of library books with my coauthor David Hansen at Duke University Libraries. And it presents the legal rationale supporting the overview document called the Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending, which has been endorsed by many national library organizations, regional library consortia, specific library systems, themselves, individual librarians, and legal experts. Ultimately, though, this is about how libraries can do what they’ve always done, right? Lend books. The paper looks at the underpinnings of the library’s historical mission through the lens of both fair use and first sale, true critical rights that I think any library uses in their programs, right? Both for lending and preservation. And I discuss how libraries can legally lend digital copies of their print collections using this technology.
But I’d like to point out that a CDL system is not a brand new concept, like Corynne stated: libraries loan books to the public. It’s what they do, for centuries. And libraries do not need permission or a license to loan those books that they have purchased or acquired. Copyright law covers those exact issues. But the difference here, I think, and some of the conflict is that the vendors and publishers have to ask permission, right? They must license. This is their business model. Historically, libraries are special creatures of copyright law; libraries have a legally authorized mandate, by the way, granted by Congress, to complete their mission to provide both access to materials. Congress actually placed all of these specialized copyright exemptions for libraries in the Copyright Act itself. So that’s kind of fun to look at library’s unique role in copyright law, they sit right in the middle, both housing the economic purpose of copyright: “we buy the books, we buy lots of books,” and the access purpose of copyright, which is, “we loan the books out to our users.”
Or if you want to put that in the constitutional narrative: libraries are promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. Libraries have historically provided unfettered access and freedom to the books that they purchase for their communities. Now, because of that, there’s multiple versions of CDL-like systems that are currently used in libraries. But I think the origin of the real legal underpinning concept was first explored by Professor Michelle Wu at Georgetown University School of Law in an article that she wrote that I read many times, “Building a Collaborative Digital Collection.” Later, the Internet Archive formed up the Open Library Program, which Chris talked about, which was nine years ago. And other institutions are exploring this option right in their own individual libraries or part of consortia or within affinity groups.
It’s exciting to see, but at its core, Controlled Digital Lending is about replicating, through the Controlled Digital Lending Process, the legal and economically significant aspects of physical lending. And in other words, let’s put this simply: it continues to preserve the powers in the print. A library has these significant legal usage rights and they have great fiscal value in their collections. Some public library systems have spent millions upon millions of dollars to make their collections accessible to the community. And I believe the CDL structure preserves that value by enhancing access of these works to the public through technology. And as Chris pointed out, it’s the same technology that’s used by publishers to distribute in the commercial marketplace.
Again, this may be about the fear of technology, certainly, but technology should be used to enhance access to materials and do what libraries have always done: increasing access to knowledge by loaning the materials to the public. Just because we’re using technology does not mean that suddenly these acts are new. And in fact, libraries have special authority to provide both access longterm to information and preserve these materials for much longer than the business model of any particular corporation, company, or vendor.
And this is especially true with the 20th Century works that are in libraries, right? They have not been available in the digital world across the board. They call this “The 20th Century Black Hole.” Many 20th Century books are not available for purchase as new copies or in print or digital versions online. And I don’t know if your students are like mine or anyone else or patrons: if it’s not digital, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist. Libraries would like to provide digital access, but we can’t, because these are not available in a licensed format or in a digital format that’s available to loan, but we have them on our shelves.
So as many of our student patrons say, “We want access to these works,” and these could be long lost print works, by the way, that are really not lost; they’re on the shelves of our libraries, just trapped there, and in COVID maybe trapped there for a longer time than anticipated. So imagine the potentially enormous high social and scholarly value and relatively low risk if we make these works available to the public for reading, quoting, citing, adaption, using Wikipedia articles. So that’s kind of the exciting aspect of it. I’m not going to get into great detail, but our principle argument in this paper, which summarizes all these points, is that Controlled Digital Lending is a fair use, which is an equitable rule of reason, that permits libraries to do what they’ve always done. And under the First Sale Doctrine, loan those books to users. Thanks a lot for your time.
Elaine Wooton contacted me as many people do – in the middle of a shutdown and discard project, asking if the Internet Archive might want some of what is destined for deep storage or the trash compactor. In this case, she said, there might be some old journals and magazines I’d want. They were centered around the culture and innovations of the modern office, “modern” being the 1970s and 1980s. My general policy is to say yes, and if possible, make my way down to get the materials themselves. This set was in New York City, and as I live outside the metropolis, I said I’d be glad to pop down from my home and pick up these 5-10 banker’s boxes worth, to make it easier.
Elaine brought out the boxes on a cart, and said that if at all possible, I might consider coming upstairs to the office she was cleaning out to see if anything else might be of interest.
I parked my car and came up.
This is what I saw.
I asked a few questions about the nature and story of this office, and based on those answers, I said something that I honestly don’t get a chance to say that often:
“We will take all of it.”
A month later, nearly the entire contents of this office and storage were here:
As our team of folks began remixing the collection of boxes from the quick job done by movers into something more manageable for the Archive, Elaine and I were standing at the final chapter of a family history that spanned many decades and represented both a disappearing world and a fascinating story.
“Psychoanalysis for your typewriter“
Imagine being so well-known for your craft that letters addressed to “Mr. Typewriter, New York” would get delivered by the Post Office to your door. Imagine you mount a letter wrong while crafting a typewriter, and it causes a country (Burma) to change that letter to accommodate your mistake. Or that, through decades, your expert testimony about the accuracy of a brand of typewriter and the characters it types means the difference between guilt, incarceration, freedom or the swapping of fortunes. Such was the life of Pearl and Martin Tytell, of Tytell Typewriter. From a shop on Fulton Street of NYC from 1938 to 2000, the couple oversaw not just endless consultations and repairs, but fabrications and projects that were revolutions in themselves. Hanging from a wall near Martin and his bowtie and lab coat was a sign reading “Psychoanalysis For Your Typewriter.” Many people, famous and not, stood under that sign, hoping their machines could be repaired and tuned by this expert shop.
Besides the repair and care of typewriters, Pearl and Martin also had a thriving and critical business in forensic document analysis, or “Questioned Document Examination” as the discipline is known. When the typewriter business wound down, the Tytell’s son, Peter, became a giant in that field and continued it as his primary vocation. These examinations became critical for researchers, criminal investigations, and courtroom testimony.
It would be a true short-changing of the Tytell legacy for me to cobble together and leave these few paragraphs about the family’s accomplishments and outlook on life, as well as the part they played in the character of New York City. Luckily for all of us, the Tytell story was unique and attractive enough to get a huge amount of stories, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, written in magazines, newspapers and blogs. There was just something incredibly compelling about the discipline and activity the family engaged in.
A Door Closing, Another Opening
Elaine, a protégée of Peter Tytell’s, was overseeing the shutdown of the Forensic Research company this summer. Peter had pleural mesothelioma and was not expected to live for much longer, but he was using his remaining strength to give instructions where he could about the closure. Among the questions were the destination of the racks of material and various artifacts and equipment inside the building.
Elaine reached out to me primarily because of our working together on the 2015 Manuals Plus loadout, an ongoing project to maintain one of the larger paper manual collections in the world. She figured I might take a few extra parts of this considerable collection, while the rest would be split between another forensic group and put into deep storage. When I indicated the Archive would just take it all, this set things into motion in a different direction.
Ultimately, Peter saw it as a good fit and a proper destination, and gave his permission during the final month of cleanup. He died on August 11, a week before the trucks began transporting the boxes of materials away.
Mostly Internet, But Still An Archive
For people who mostly pay attention to the online experience of Internet Archive, it might come as a surprise that we maintain extensive physical materials, primarily printed. It might come as a greater surprise to know these items number in the millions and span many different mediums. A documentary called Recorder touches on the Marion Stokes collection we house, which are thousands of videotapes recorded over decades.
While some of the items in the Tytell Collection might be outside the realm of what we would normally acquire, it seemed right to just accept the entire set, as together it tells a stronger story than having parts of it discarded or stored elsewhere. This was, after all, a multi-generational family business and the already-whittled results of years of maintenance and caretaking by Peter Tytell; there didn’t seem to be a reason to arbitrarily cut it down further.
Two Days of Sorting
Upon arrival, the collection was mostly in large sets of arbitrary piles with some rough markings by the movers, as well as scrawled notes by Peter put there over the years. While some boxes might have seemed crushed, in fact it was because they were housing heavy typewriters, wrapped in bubble wrap, and had combined into a sort of gravity well of cardboard. They’re all fine.
We spent two days inspecting all the boxes, and moving them into rough classifications: Books, Ephemera, Typewriters, Equipment, and so on. In doing so, we got a (very) initial assessment of the treasures within. Some notable examples:
The subject matter of the hundreds of books in the collection range from criminal law (related to the investigative arm of the company) to graphology (study of handwriting) as well as overviews of law enforcement, detective work, and extensive guides of typewriter history. Some of these books are very old; an 1892 treatise on the ins and outs of bookkeeping was particularly beautiful.
Hundreds of samples, both printed and hand-made, of typewriter output, separated by years, brands, and models. This may be one of the most important pieces of the collection, and one that will be digitized as soon as possible; they represent hard knowledge and evidence of what typewriters were capable of or what brands had which abilities at what time. These cards were used by the Tytells in court cases; research into what typewriters were capable of what featured in the Killian Documents Controversy.
Brochures, stand-ups and manuals related to typewriter and print. There are thousands of pages of documents in this collection related to the sale, operation and overview of typewriters. They are incredibly well preserved and very beautiful, and digitizing them will be a chore but also a joy with what comes out the other end.
Typewriters of every description; standard commercial models now long out of production and sale, as well as custom or extremely-low production examples, such as machines that type in Arabic or Hebrew. They will not be stored away never to be seen again; they will, however it is worked out, play a part in telling the story of typewriters and the family that lovingly worked on them for so long.
If the variation and size of this collection seems endless – that’s a natural reaction. In fact, it is exciting on many different levels, with all sorts of disciplines combining into pallets of boxes now sitting quietly in storage. That’s the magic of a acquisition like this; the character and nature of a family of experts breathes out from every container.
It’ll be an extensive project to process and understand everything here, and it’ll be an honor to play a part in its preservation. We mourn those who came before us and thank them, as we can, for the opportunity to keep telling their stories.
Further Reading of Tytell Typewriter Company and Peter, Martin and Pearl Tytell
On July 22, 2020, Chris Freeland, Director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive, spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit brought by the publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House against our non-profit digital library.These are his remarks:
I’m Chris Freeland, I’m a librarian at the Internet Archive and I’m the Director of the Open Libraries Program at the Internet Archive. I’ve been at the Internet Archive for more than two and a half years. Before joining the Archive, I was an associate university librarian at Washington University in St. Louis, and then before that I was the Technical Director of a project called the Biodiversity Heritage Library. And so for more than 15 years, I’ve worked in partnership with the Internet Archive to digitize books and make them as widely available as possible through technology and through copyright.
In that same amount of time, that’s when the Internet Archive was partnering with those one thousand libraries that Brewster just mentioned to digitize nearly four million books. So most of those books, when we were partnering with libraries, most of those books were in the public domain, and that means that those were easily published online. They didn’t need restrictions for use. They didn’t need any kind of controls. But at the Internet Archive, we think that everyone deserves to learn. So our goal is to build a research library with more than four million modern books that we can make available to users all over the world.
Now you may be asking why four million? Four million books is the size of a large metropolitan public library. It’s about the same size as a Chicago Public Library or a San Francisco Public Library. And we think that everyone, regardless of where they live, should have equal and equitable access to a comprehensive library. And so to date, we’ve digitized nearly 1.5 million books on the way towards that four million book goal.
So the way that we lend books to our patrons is through Controlled Digital Lending. So Controlled Digital Lending is a legal practice that makes works accessible that are still in copyright. We started working with Controlled Digital Lending with the Boston Public Library, on a pilot that we called at that time “digitize and lend” those books that were in copyright. Now, nine years later, hundreds of other libraries of all sizes in the US and Canada are also participating in Controlled Digital Lending and they’ve embraced the model.
So here’s the way the Controlled Digital Lending works. We only loan as many copies as we and our library partners own, and those checkouts have time limits and the files are protected by the same digital rights management software that publishers use. It’s not a free-for-all. It’s controlled, that’s the “control” in Controlled Digital Lending. So Controlled Digital Lending helps us make information available, which is incredibly important from my perspective as a librarian. It’s a necessary way to increase equity in our education system, and it’s part of the mission of libraries.
In addition to digitizing, we’re also helping libraries and institutions preserve their collections and to keep them safe and accessible. So let me give you a little example, a story from last year. Marygrove College closed last year, and a central concern for the school’s president, Dr. Elizabeth Burns, and for the Board of Trustees is what do we do with the library? Those 70,000 volumes that are in that library that were in the school that was closing. So after hearing about the Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending program, the college decided to donate the entire library to us for digitization and for preservation, so that the legacy of the college would live on. And so that those books would be available for future scholars.
So in closing my little portion here, I want to leave you with an impact story of why Controlled Digital Lending matters. So we’ve received hundreds of testimonials and published two blog posts that are full of statements from users who have used our lending library while their own libraries and their schools were closed. And one such statement really helped underscore that impact of CDL. And it comes to us from Benjamin Saracco, who is a librarian at a medical center in New Jersey. And Benjamin wrote to us, and to let us know that he was able to find basic life support manuals that were needed by the frontline workers at the medical center where he worked. He needed those and he had to use our library because his physical collection was closed due to COVID-19. It may sound impossible to think, but it’s true. Lives were saved because of Controlled Digital Lending. That is impactful.
As students around the world resume their education, millions of learners are facing uncertainty about school schedules, class formats, and online study. As a nonprofit dedicated to Universal Access to All Knowledge, the Internet Archive provides a number of free resources for parents, students, teachers, and librarians around the world—check out these tools for remote learning!
For Parents
Do you have a budding history buff, wildlife biologist, artist, or stargazer on your hands? Looking for books to entertain and educate them with? We’ve created a number of handy resource guides on a range of subjects, from astronauts to zebras. You can also check out some previous compilations of our favorite collections!
Of course, one of the best ways to support your child’s education is by reading to and with them. The Internet Archive’s Open Library contains thousands of children’s books to check out and enjoy together.
For Students
If you need homework help, The Internet Archive has a huge array of textbooks and study guides. If you’re looking for primary sources to cite in your History assignments, our 26 million historical books and texts are a great place to start; if you’re trying to get through English class we also have thousands of works of literature from around the world.
In these tumultuous times, we want to make sure that students have the tools they need to learn—and we couldn’t offer the resources we do without the help of our partners, donors, and supporters everywhere. Whether you’re looking for homework help, teaching via videoconference, or finding new ways to support your patrons, we hope that our collections prove useful to you.
Stay safe and healthy, and thanks for using the archive!
In 1847, Frederick Douglass started a newspaper advocating the abolition of slavery that ran until 1851. After the Civil War, there was a newspaper for freed slaves, the Freedmen’s Record. The Internet Archive is bringing these and many more works online for free public access. But there’s a problem:
Our Optical Character Recognition (OCR), while the best commercially available OCR technology, is not very good at identifying text from older documents.
Take for example, this newspaper from 1847. The images are not that great, but a person can read them:
The problem is our computers’ optical character recognition tech gets it wrong, and the columns get confused.
What we need is “Culture Tech” (a riff on fintech, or biotech) and Culture Techies to work on important and useful projects–the things we need, but are probably not going to get gushers of private equity interest to fund. There are thousands of professionals taking on similar challenges in the field of digital humanities and we want to complement their work with industrial-scale tech that we can apply to cultural heritage materials.
One such project would be to work on technologies to bring 19th-century documents fully digital. We need to improve OCR to enable full text search, but we also need help segmenting documents into columns and articles. The Internet Archive has lots of test materials and thousands are uploading more documents all the time.
What we do not have is a good way to integrate work on these projects with the Internet Archive’s processing flow. So we need help and ideas there as well.
Maybe we can host an “Archive Summer of CultureTech” or something…Just ideas. Maybe working with a university department that would want to build programs and classes around Culture Tech… If you have ideas or skills to contribute, please post a comment here or send an email to info@archive.org with some of this information.
Anne McDonald and Jason C. McDonald of AJ Charleson Publishing LLC, and a selection of their books, which are now available for borrowing through controlled digital lending.
By Caralee Adams, freelance writer.
Jason C. McDonald wrote the first draft of his latest mystery using a manual typewriter.
“It forces you to think about the flow of writing in a different way than when you can’t easily erase something,” says the author and owner of AJ Charleson Publishing LLC. “It can take a story in a very unexpected — and great — direction.”
McDonald may be old school in his approach to crafting a novel, but he is innovative in how he is trying to connect with readers.
The Idaho writer has long been a fan of the Internet Archive and its vast amount of newspapers, magazines, and recordings for research. So when it came to getting exposure for his books, McDonald wanted to give back to the collection.
“I really support libraries and Internet Archive’s lending program is basically an international library. It spans borders,” says McDonald. “The whole purpose is to get these resources into the hands of people that need them in a way that is controlled — and it’s free.”
McDonald is a computer programmer by day and author who is chipping away on four manuscripts now on nights and weekends. He’s just getting started with his independent publishing company and would like to expand. Yet, it’s a struggle to get the word out about his print books. McDonald lists his titles in buyers’ catalogues, promotes them at book signings and relies on word of mouth marketing.
“Especially here in COVID era, we aren’t going to bookstores. People want to be able to read part of a book first to get an idea of what it’s like,” says McDonald. “Buying a print-only book sight unseen is an odd idea to some people.”
I think in the end, [Controlled Digital Lending] drives sales because you are finding readers you wouldn’t normally have. Those readers aren’t getting a copy that they keep forever — it’s a copy that’s going to lead them to want to own it.
The Archive also provides readers of its digitized online books a chance to easily purchase a copy through Better World Books, an affordable alternative to Amazon and an avenue to help amplify sales for less well-known authors. Having his works circulating digitally through the Internet Archive will give the public a chance to read part — or all — of his books and then make an informed decision about whether they want to buy it.
“It’s the same logic as with a library. It increases the visibility of a book,” McDonald says of CDL. “I think in the end, it drives sales because you are finding readers you wouldn’t normally have. Those readers aren’t getting a copy that they keep forever — it’s a copy that’s going to lead them to want to own it.”
User behavior is changing. Over the past few years, we’ve seen an incredible climb in mobile usage of Archive.org. To keep with the times, the Internet Archive’s Fundraising and Front End teams are excited to announce the release of new mobile-friendly donation options!
We now offer Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Venmo in addition to Credit Card, Paypal, and Crypto as donation payment methods. These slick new platforms make donating to the Internet Archive faster and simpler. Want to give it a try? Visit archive.org/donate to make a donation and let us know what you think in the donation comment box!
Keep in mind that some payment methods work better with certain devices or certain browsers. Below is a general list of compatibility:
Platform
Credit Card
Paypal
Apple Pay
Google Pay
Venmo
Crypto
Windows
✔️
✔️
–
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–
✔️
MacOS
✔️
✔️
Safari w/ Touch ID only
✔️
–
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Linux
✔️
✔️
–
✔️
–
✔️
iPhone/iPad
✔️
✔️
Safari only
✔️
Safari / Chrome / Brave only
✔️
Android
✔️
✔️
–
✔️
Chrome / Brave only
✔️
We still accept all major credit cards, Paypal, cryptocurrency, stock, gold bricks, and more. For a list of all payment methods accepted, visit our FAQ page.
A big thank you to everyone on our Front End and Fundraising teams for their efforts getting these new features launched. And to all of our donors, THANK YOU for supporting your Internet Archive!
People’s access to accurate, reliable information is always essential. Of course, it becomes ever more critical during a global pandemic like COVID.
But giving people “internet access” alone is not enough. For information to be useful to people, the means of access cannot be a one-way street. Information is social. Information must be contextualized. What are the spoken languages, levels of reading literacy, ways of life, and the legacies of systemic oppression? Community networks take a holistic approach to information and communication technology. Instead of seeing people as passive users, people are active participants, co-creating media through collaborative processes, thereby making it more inherently more accessible than content produced elsewhere.
These are some of the main takeaways from the DWeb Meetup on July 29, 2020. Four DWeb Camp 2019 Global Fellows shared how their community networks in South Africa, Brazil and India are adapting to COVID. Though they can connect to the World Wide Web, the fact that these networks maintain steady connectivity between local nodes with locally-hosted content is in many ways more valuable than their internet access.
So how do their community networks steward connectivity and information in this way? How do they work with their communities to produce local knowledge that feeds their networks?
Community Networks Contextualize Information
Sol Luca de Tena, director of Zenzeleni Networks Non-Profit Corporation (NPC), spoke with us from Cape Town, South Africa. Zenzeleni Networks supports and seeds cooperatively-owned community networks. There are currently two community networks, Zenzeleni Mankosi Cooperative and Zenzeleni Zithulele Cooperative. Together they cover 19 villages and are the first legally-recognized community networks that are owned and governed by their members in South Africa.
She described how the problem in rural South Africa went beyond having access to reliable information. The public health information regarding COVID was not even useful given the realities of people, especially given that it was not even available in their languages:
“So imagine in your [urban] setting, all the [COVID safety] guidelines that are being published by the government and by doctors, are about how to stay safe when using a communal tap. How to stay safe when taking your cattle out, or tending for your crops. Amidst the anxiety of knowing what to do, what’s real, what’s not. When the information is not contextual, and it’s not even in your first, or second, or third language, imagine the strain that creates.”
The Zenzeleni community networks serve areas where, over the last decade, its network was largely built alongside its energy infrastructure. Its lack of public services and infrastructure was a direct legacy of underdevelopment due to the Apartheid regime. When national and international health guidelines on COVID assume access to running water and other amenities, it just was not helpful or relevant.
“Our Stories, Our Internet”
Two of Zenzeleni’s initiatives were started to address this. The first was the Digital Community Notice Board. Though they had already zero-rated many websites for health and educational resources, they were finding that it was difficult to filter and make sense of it. The Notice Board curates information from credible sources, carries videos in local languages, and empowers people to filter information that is relevant to them.
The second project Sol shared with us was Amabali Wethu, Intanethi Yethu (“Our Stories, Our Internet”) Challenge. It came out of the need for more content that is locally-created by indigenous black community members. The challenge calls for content in audio and visual formats and makes the content freely available on the networks across 65 hotspots. Those who create the works can win cash prizes to incentivize people to contribute and help people financially.
Sol emphasized that we need to think about tech as being not separate from people’s lives. The internet is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. Our networks ought to come out of our communities, and be designed according to actual felt needs.
Nodes that Bond
Marcela Guerra joined us from Monteiro Lobato, in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo. She helps with her neighborhood association, Portal Sem Porteiras, whose main project is operating a local community mesh network. The network uses Altermundi’s Libre Routers for its 18 nodes and has over 200+ devices connected. They use Pirania, a captive portal system also built by Altermundi, to moderate the use of the network and gather micropayments to help pay for the ISP connection.
Marcela discussed the organizational hurdles of maintaining the network. With more than 12 people volunteering to maintain it, they made big changes to the way they organized themselves and have made its management more decentralized. They split themselves into five territories, where each group of volunteers is responsible for the connectivity issue of each area’s network.
But as a community network, she said, the work can get very personal. Marcela said that neighbors often knock on the doors of network maintainers when they need internet connection. So they created a virtual channel with a made-up character to help answer those queries. A person is actually answering them behind the scenes, but the character helps to prevent people from getting attached to specific people.
Of course, since all the volunteers are members of the communities themselves, it can be difficult to manage their time and priorities when you live there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Marcela said that they’re trying to get more involved and are working on better governance so they can consider all their members’ perspectives and adapt as best they can.
In the meantime, they are opening a new physical location, a hub, for their community network. It’s a well-ventilated house where people can exchange knowledge and take care of personal business — to pay their bills, use a printer, and other tasks people need specialized devices to do.
The other project Marcela coordinates is called Nodes that Bond, which works to shift women’s relationships with technology. They used to have in-person monthly women’s circles to build trust and connection with each other, which was important as they shared personal stories and shaped what they wanted to be able to do with their community network.
Since the pandemic began however, they replaced the women’s circles with a podcast that collects testimonials on various subjects. Some of the episodes help women navigate tech documentation, and others help them as they go through a digital security orientation. She is now working with her team on an audio novella based on research from 2019 about local women’s stories of domestic violence. In order to anonymize the women’s identities, the novella will weave those into one story of a fictional woman.
Marcela combines creativity and practical approaches to ensure her local network is both sustainable and accessible to the women and underserved in her community.
Scrap Laptops + Raspberry Pis + Kolibri
Hiure Queiroz, tech lead of Coolab, supports the creation and maintenance of community networks in his local area. Like most places in the world, education in his community has been hugely impacted by COVID. He talked about how he is using the local mesh (which Marcela mentioned runs on Libre Routers) to provide educational resources to students.
Hiure is relying on Kolibri, an offline educational application built by Learning Equality, which he said was the best app he found for peer-to-peer networks. He is equipping scrapped laptops with Raspberry Pis to wirelessly mesh the devices to build the peer-to-peer network. He named these devices “Frankenberries”. Students and teachers can then use the Frankenberriess to access the educational materials on Kolibri.
Previously, students had to read and access educational materials on their parents’ mobile phones. With the Frankenberry laptops, students can more easily read and interact with the materials. Hiure is holding study groups with students and teachers to train them in using this system.
In order to meet the urgent educational needs of his community under COVID, Hiure is building devices and fashioning them with the materials teachers require to teach their students. Just as important to this is the training he is holding to onboard them.
Building Local Knowledge with Hypermedia and Mesh Mash Networks
Last but not least was TB Dinesh, who presented his work with Janastu, and Servelots. He is building free and open source technologies to address the needs of populations in the Global South, particularly indigenous communities and those experiencing systemic inequity and prejudice. Dinesh’s passion is building the tools for a truly inclusive Web, one that takes into account that still a large population of the world have low reading literacy.
Dinesh is based in a village that lies on top of a hill next to a valley, about one hour from the city of Bangalore in India. A mesh network connects his village to other villages across the valley.
Janastu has built a radio storytelling platform atop that mesh network, enabling people to share their stories and knowledge using audio and visual media. They converted old phone booths into nodes for the radio, called Namdu1Radio. They are equipped with Raspberry Pis that allow people to walk up to listen to other people’s recordings or record their own with a push of a button. Dinesh noted that making the technology approachable this way is crucial. By making use of familiar infrastructure, like a phone booth, you can more easily embed new technology.
But archiving this material in ways that low literacy people can contribute, was another challenge they wanted to address. Dinesh and his team have created hypermedia archives, using image-based web annotation technology to connect audio to other audio. Like hypertext, where text documents are interconnected with other text documents through links, hypermedia does the same using media. The archive tool allows people to drag-and-drop images to associate them to audio files.
Their hypermedia project has been underway for several years. What have they had to change since the COVID lockdowns? This year, Janastu was planning to go to another village and build out their mesh network, radio, and hypermedia archive in an area 2000km away. The pandemic forced them to indefinitely postpone that project.
Now Dinesh and his team are building what he calls a “mesh mash” — a mesh network with an overlay or logical network. Since building out the physical mesh network is difficult under the lockdown, they are enabling other devices, such as laptops or tablets connected through mobile cell service, to be part of the mesh.
They use IPv6 identifiers to allow those devices to connect and access the other nodes on the network. The mesh mash uses Syncthing to keep files synchronized and up-to-date across the mesh network. They use Yggdrasil to configure log-ins and host video streamed workshops that are broadcast across the network.
Dinesh is currently building out Papad, the audio annotation tool. Like the hypermedia archives, the images can be dragged and dropped to related audio files. People can also add text tags to add another layer of annotation. For example, if an audio recording is about a math lesson, someone could find an image of numbers and arithmetic operators and add that to the audio file. This is all updated and available across the mesh network.
This allows people to not only contribute their knowledge and stories to the mesh network. It empowers people to organize and archive this shared knowledge so it’s discoverable, all without needing to be able to read or write. This shared hypermedia archive enables people to connect across similar interests, share recipes, and even offer gig services across the villages.
Dinesh’s projects emerge out of a passion for creating technology that is community maintained and developed. He believes in the potential of technology, combined with locally-available resources and knowledge, to bring about local futures that are more equitable and self-determining.
Reflections
As COVID spread throughout the world, even those in the most internet-connected, developed cities were susceptible to misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news. Here in the United States, COVID has exposed deep deficiencies in how we access accurate, reliable information, especially about what we each must do to mitigate this crisis in our communities.
The Global Fellows showed us how their communities are taking control of their network infrastructure, to make the information that is shared on their networks more relevant, accessible, and valuable for themselves. It’s easy to become disillusioned with the centralized, top-down, and profit-based systems that those of us in urban and developed areas have come to rely on for our news and information. Seeing how the Global Fellows are innovating to create homegrown technologies to address immediate information and education challenges is truly awe-inspiring.
What they are showing us is that “decentralization” is not only a matter of developing technology that is not centrally managed. It’s about building community, meeting people where they are, and approaching technology not as an end unto itself, but a means to address the real challenges that people face.
Lila Bailey, Esq.—Policy Counsel for the Internet Archive
This week, Public Knowledge, the public interest policy group, announced the winners of its 17th annual IP3 Awards. IP3 awards honor those who have made significant contributions in the three areas of “IP”—intellectual property, information policy, and internet protocol. On September 24, the 2020 Intellectual Property award will be presented to Lila Bailey, Policy Counsel at the Internet Archive.
“She has been a tremendous advocate and leader behind the scenes on behalf of libraries and archives, ensuring both can serve the public in the digital era,” said Chris Lewis, President and CEO of Public Knowledge. “Working at the intersection between copyright and information access, Lila has been instrumental in promoting equitable access to contemporary research through Controlled Digital Lending — the library lending practice currently under threat because of a legal challenge from large commercial publishers.”
“My whole career has been leading up to this moment,” Bailey mused, speaking about her role defending the Internet Archive against the publishers’ copyright lawsuit. “This is what I went to law school to do: to fight for the democratization of knowledge.”
Lila Bailey, center, with lawyers and librarians Michelle Wu, Lisa Weaver, Jim Michalko, Michael Blackwell and Tom Blake in 2019, during visits to Capitol Hill where they helped explain Controlled Digital Lending to key legislators.
As a law school student at Berkeley Law, Bailey was a student attorney at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, where she laid the legal groundwork for the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive.
In private practice at Perkins Cole, Bailey won the Pro Bono Leadership award for her tireless work defending the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine against a legal challenge.
Bailey later went on to work for Creative Commons, helping to ensure that everyone everywhere has access to high quality, open educational resources. She served as a fellow at the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and later returned to Berkeley Law as a Teaching Fellow to help train the next generation of public interest technology lawyers.
“Now that our lives are largely online, copyright law, which is supposed to promote creativity and learning, sometimes creates barriers to these daily activities. The work I am doing is to try to clear some of those barriers away so we can realize that utopian vision of universal access to knowledge.”
–Lila Bailey
Since joining the Internet Archive as Policy Counsel in 2017, Bailey has focused on building a community of practice around Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). Although the library practice has existed for more than a decade, Bailey has been working with Michelle Wu, Kyle K. Courtney, David Hansen, Mary Minow and other legal scholars to help libraries navigate the complex legal framework that allows libraries to bring their traditional lending function online. Today, with hundreds of endorsers, Controlled Digital Lending defines a legal pathway for libraries to digitize the books they already own and lend them online in a secure way.
“As a copyright lawyer, I find her to be an incredibly inspiring colleague, a natural leader, and great person,” said Harvard Copyright Advisor, Kyle Courtney, who works with Bailey on the CDL Task Force. “I know that her work creates a multiplier effect that can inspire others, like myself, to advocate for greater access to culture and enhance a library’s role in the modern world.”
So what drives this intellectual property warrior forward? “Access to knowledge matters to everyone. It’s the great equalizer. That is what the internet has given us—this vision of everyone having equal ability to learn and also to teach, to read and also to speak,” she explained. “Now that our lives are largely online, copyright law, which is supposed to promote creativity and learning, sometimes creates barriers to these daily activities. The work I am doing is to try to clear some of those barriers away so we can realize that utopian vision of universal access to knowledge.”
Previous IP3 Award winners include Bailey’s mentors Professor Pam Samuelson and Internet Archive founder, Brewster Kahle; along with many of her heroes including professors Peter Jaszi, Lateef Mtima, and Rebecca Tushnet. Be sure to attend the award ceremony on September 24, 6-8 PM ET, by registering here.
