Transcript: Archive this, but do it right, Jeff Ubois warns

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1594/archive-this-but-do-it-right-jeff-ubois-warns

Host: Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Guest: Jeff Ubois - AMIA

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, who are you, and where are you, first of all?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
So, my name is Jeff Ubois, I'm based here in Berkeley. I'm a cross between a contractor and independent scholar and I'm working for a number of organizations that are concerned with preserving culture and making it more accessible on the Internet.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
So it spans a whole range of issues, a lot of which boil down to mass-digitization of books and film and sound and making that available on the Internet.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Right.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
As you know there are a lot of companies that are taking a run at that. There are a lot...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Google and Microsoft and Yahoo.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
And a few others.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, plenty of others. Then there are a lot of academic and non-profit things that are oriented the same way. So you hear of foundations, like the Hewlett Foundation is supporting work at Yale. Here at Berkeley, there has been a team of people that have put the classroom instruction online. MIT has been doing that for a long way. So this kind of whole flood of stuff that has not...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Are you guys involved with the Internet archives?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
I am. I do work with the Internet archives. I'm one of the people that kind of orbits the archive and I do projects for the archives on the net.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Because they got the Grateful Dead, I mean how are the books (ph)?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Isn't that great (ph)? That's actually a really interesting model project, because one of the tensions is how much of this is going to get done by professionals, and how much of this is going to get done by everybody else. In fact, the fans have proven to be really good archivists of the dead shows. There has always been this tension between the professionals and the non-professionals in the archiving community. Sometimes, the professionals -- well, partly they take money from the established institutions, which is appropriate but it makes it hard for them to work with people that maybe seen as pirates. So you see this in the film world where the amateurs were...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
We should -- before we get to stay (Voice Overlap).

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
There might be some voices in the background because this is Dave Winer's house, right? And then...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
We're sitting on the RSS couch, which is probably appropriate for this conversation.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Completely.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
We're watching the sunset over the Golden Gage Bridge.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Over the Golden Gage.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Which is awesome.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Which is great, yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
We will look (ph) through the camera on later, so we can look into that.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Well, feel free to edit.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
We don't edit.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Okay.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
We're totally into the archiving. Not removing any unimportant part of the conversations, because we never know what's important and what's unimportant to other people.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
That's really true.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Well, I will do my best to be (Inaudible). So anyway, there is this work that's done by amateurs and work that's done by professionals. Sometimes the amateurs turn out to be great heroes of the archival community because they've save something that hasn't otherwise been saved. One of the things that I want to talk about today with you was how do you get public-private partnerships to work effectively for the public good. So, imagine you're a librarian or you're an archivists, or you're somebody who's been capturing these dead shows, and you're operating on a shoestring and you're doing it for the love of it, or your institution isn't terribly well-funded, and you're thinking about, how can I make this material more accessible?

Well, I know, I'll put it on the Internet and then people will be able to see it. Material that seems tends to be preserved more, if things are accessed, there's a reason to preserve them, it's easier to have materials that are accessible, funded and loved and used and people care for them. If they're in a dark box in a closet then that may not happen as much. So you're thinking "Okay, well what do I do? I'm not going to get any more money out of my existing funders to do this typically, money is short. So you think "Well, why not partner with a commercial concern, and that can in fact be a great way to go.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
That's how Google and Microsoft get involved in your life, right?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Exactly.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Because Google and Microsoft are seeing, if you have like the library of Congress or a library in London or somewhere, and I'm Google, or I'm Microsoft, I see that you have content that people will want to visit, and anytime I see people visiting something, I can put an ad next to it.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Exactly.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
And make some money off of that and it's cheap content, because all I had to do was hire the scanner and maybe pay you a royalty, or maybe pay you a share of that money coming in. So if somebody clicks on an ad on your page, a dollar comes in, well, I'll take 40% of it and give you 60% or maybe even less.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Good monopolist, right? So how does that conversation go down, and how do you protect -- make sure that your rights are kept?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
We're exactly in the middle of that discussion and -- well, let me start with a horror story which happened this spring, which was -- the Smithsonian is in this position, and Congress is telling the Smithsonian all the time, "Well, you should be more self-sustaining. We need to be more self-sustaining. We don't want to have to write checks to you for all eternity". So people at the Smithsonian thought about this and they thought, well what can we do? Well, the National Geographic has done pretty well with this cable channel. We'll do a partnership with a cable company like ShowTime. Part of the ShowTime deal involves management of the archive, the Smithsonian has had people go all over the world with film cameras and video cameras and they have this great joint collection of stuff and part of the deal was, well, the ShowTime Network will begin to manage access to that archive.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
This was a deal that was done under NDA. So one of the first things that happens, and this happens with a lot of the discussions between libraries, museums, archives and commercial companies, the first thing they say is, "Well, here's an NDA, sign an NDA, because we want you to make the most complex and difficult decision of your career without talking to your peers, we don't want you talking to your peer group about this".

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
There is a more legitimate reason which is, they're trying to conduct free discussions in a highly charged legal atmosphere. They don't want to get sued, but the fundamental effect of the NDA is to cut people off from their peers.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
So, how are they going to make a good decision?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, and from the company's standpoint, they're probably trying to keep it quiet, because they want to have a big news announcement at some point in future, and if you talked about it with all your peers, they all know about it, then they'll leak it, or they're going to work against my interest, and I'm not going to be able to explain what I'm trying to do. So, I'll take the ugly corporate.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Good. I mean...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I've decided to do that. (Voice Overlap) we can argue about some of these.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
I think that's totally appropriate, because there is...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
It's like Apple doesn't let their employees blog very openly, right?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Sure.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Because Steve Jobs wants to go on stage and have something new to show, and if you let everybody talk about the iPod that they're developing, you would never get that surprise and shock.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
There's no hit.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, and the press doesn't have to come, because they already heard about it.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Already heard about it. So, you sink without a trace. I mean the companies are taking a little bit of a leap in the dark, right? They're not exactly sure how they're going to make their money back. So then the next thing that some of them will like is some type of exclusivity, some type of exclusive control, which the Smithsonian agreed to.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Then they wrapped this all up into a 170 page agreement that no one's been able to look at. So, at that point, a lot of film makers who don't work for ShowTime thought, oh my God, we're not going to get good access to this archive any more. It's essentially a competing group of people that's going to have control of this common cultural heritage, and so Ken Burns and a lot of other people got pretty upset about this and called for hearings on Capitol Hill. The GAO is coming out with the report soon saying, "That Smithsonian is very, very bad." There are a lot of moves to cut Smithsonian's funding. So all of a sudden, here they were where they thought they were embracing the future and doing the right thing and taking this visionary approach to public-private partnership, and instead, they're getting pilloried as the terrible warning example.

What did they do? Well, they signed an NDA, they signed an exclusive agreement, they didn't consult with their peers, they made it essentially exclusive, and even the deals that aren't necessarily exclusive in writing, maybe in fact, because it takes a lot of time and effort on the part of your staff to be engaged in one of these digitization projects. So even if in theory someone can come into your library, and now I'm switching to another medium, someone can come into your library and scan all the books. In practice that maybe difficult to do. Scanning you usually get one shot. That's what happened with microfilm that, I think it all happens with books. We only get one shot at the scanning. So it's important to get these deals right and there are some problems with the ones that have been signed.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Tricky (Inaudible) to handle, I'll keep ranting.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Keep going. I want to hear about the problem.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Okay. So, if you look at the book deals that have been done, and only a couple of them are available, a lot of them are still under NDA. We don't know what are actually in the contract terms. One of the sets of restrictions that are intended to preserve the ability of the commercial partners to make a profit, are things on how they can pool the scans, how they can use the scans? Where that gets to be an issue is you can just think through the way the scanning process works. So let's say that you're scanning at a collection of libraries and you want to be efficient, so you don't want to scan a book in library 'A' that you already scanned in library 'E'.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Right.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
So, you have an agreement under NDA usually, with five or six or seven or ten libraries, and at each one you say, Well look, we're only going to give you back scans of the books that we've scanned at your library.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
We're not going to duplicate the scans that we've done elsewhere.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
You're free to use those scanned files on campus however you want, but you're not free to use them for any commercial purpose, you're not free to share them with other people on the academic community. So the effect of that is you get a commercial organization that has copies of all the scans, and you get libraries that have only those books that are in their collection. So what happens to the student in 2016, ten years from now?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
That student's going to have a choice of going to the university digital library, which is going to be incomplete, maybe incomplete, and going to the commercial organizations. So there's this real shift, I mean we're really talking about privatizing the culture in a big way and that's got a lot of implications that I don't think have been fully figured out, I've certainly haven't figured them all out.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
No.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
So, that's the issue, what kind of restrictions are put on these scans, whether they are scans of films or books or sound recording?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Now, some of the scan -- because I remember interviewing a team at Microsoft that was scanning some of these stuff, and their deal was that you could scan it and put it in the Internet archive as well as put it in your own servers and then Microsoft has a commercial license to that.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yes, that's right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Does that satisfy you or do you still want -- tell me some of the problems with that kind of approach?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
I think the open content alliance, and as we were talking about earlier, full disclosure, I work for the open content alliance often on...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
That's what Microsoft was working with, scan these books and they get...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
That's right. Yeah, yeah. Has developed a set of principles about how you scan and share the scans, because they're -- I mean, the incentives to scan get kind of blurry if you can imagine someone else is going to do it for you, why would you bother? So there is an issue of how do you give the right set of incentives to institutions to participate, but I think both Yahoo and Microsoft and the Internet Archive thought through some of the issues around sharing, and bulk re-hosting and commercial versus non-commercial use, which is one of the big issue.

There's another bright dividing line between material that is still in copyright and material that isn't. So the stuff that's in copyright, you really have to treat as purely a finding aid, we're scanning these books in order to create the world's greatest card catalogue or something that let's you find what's there, and the stuff that's public domain and how you handle the public domain scans is different.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
There's fair use for rules, so I can put, -- like Amazon has a chapter of my book.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yes.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
And that is under Fair Use because only a small percentage of my book was scanned and put up in a commercial context. My copyright holder which is widely publishing, doesn't want the whole book out there.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yes.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
There is a Fair Use part of the Copyright Law that lets me take 10%, or some small percent of what you've done as a copyright holder, and put that out as a finding like you said.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah. I think the best line about Fair Use is Larry Lessig, he says, Fair Use is the right to hire a lawyer. Fair Use is not really well articulated in a lot of places and we're still trying to work out

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
All these entities we're talking about have lots of lawyers. Microsoft has 810 lawyers involved and probably libraries actually don't have good lawyers.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
That's exactly right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Because lawyers are expensive. You're talking $300 an hour and...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Exactly.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
...that's to (Voice Overlap) on the phone.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Exactly, and as soon as you sign an NDA, how you do get engaged in good collective bargaining or something? I mean you think of lots of -- other content holders have a concept called Most Favored Nation which means, I want my deal to be as good as anybody else's. You can't give a better deal to anybody else. Well, libraries aren't engaged in any kind of Most Favored Nation negotiation, but I think they should be, it's harder to do (Voice Overlap).

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Why aren't the libraries just transparent about what they're doing and sort of say, "Hey, we're thinking of opening our collection up and we want to make as good a deal for us as possible, and we want to make sure that this stuff is preserved and have an open public discussion, why if you're Smithsonian, try to make a deal quickly without having that kind of discussion?"

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
I think that's an excellent question. I wish I had a really good answer for you on that. I mean I think having to go to the library with a Freedom of Information Act request, I mean since when have I had to go to librarians with the Freedom of Information Act request to get information that they had on hand, I mean there's something that's very odd in that whole scenario. I think the librarians would be well served, and some of them are getting together to talk out about these things.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So are you doing this Freedom of Information Act requests?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
I haven't, but I read them when they come out. So, there have been two and they're different versions of the story about the one at Michigan. One of the main ones that came out was Google Book Deal at the University of Michigan. I've heard different versions of how that came about. One being that people at Michigan were aware this is going to happen, a little bit sooner than maybe their commercial partner and other people saying no, no, everybody knew it was going to come out because it's a public institution.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. Tell me what happened in that situation?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Well, I mean basically there is a multipage document that goes over in great detail how the scanning will be handled between Google and the University of Michigan. One of the interesting things about it is, you can see that agreement evolve because that agreement was signed prior to the one here at UC Berkeley. So Karen Coyle, who's a librarian here, has done this very close, clause by clause analysis and noted some of the differences, like who gets to have final say on quality control, for example, or subtle differences in the pooling arrangements that are possible for each institution going forward.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What's the best deal you've seen?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Oh, that's a good question.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is there a best case that you would say, go look -- for libraries considering doing these kinds of deals, go look at this one and try to at least get close to that or go further?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Well, I'll give you my bias -- I'll give you my biased answer, I actually think the deals that have been done around the open content alliance are probably most favorable to public use.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What are some of those, so we can search Google or search (Voice Overlap)?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, you're right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Which is ironic of itself, right?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Reaction does find some of these, or do you use a Search Engine?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, well I think the...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
The British Library did one, right?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, they did. I mean one of the -- I suppose the model -- and I'm jumping back and forth, I recognize, between books and video, but in the end they end up being big files with...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
It's the same stuff.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
...complex copyright restrictions on them and so on. So one, I think that's fair (Inaudible) model is the creative archive at the BBC. Another one is INA, the French Broadcasting Services, has really (Inaudible) on the furthest of any of the national broadcasters in making material available. That's another sort of direction we can take the conservation is, there are different purposes that are served by this. One is preservation, and long term preservation and that's a hard problem and that's hard to find and hard to figure out, and there's sort of a question about how you do that technically. I went to a meeting of film and video archivists in Alaska last month and, one of the main ads in the conference (Inaudible) was from Kodak, and it was saying that, film, it's the one true archival medium, so its Cowbones not spinning disks that we're going to store our culture on by going...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
(Inaudible)

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I mean in terms of length, we're talking thousands of years, I mean the pyramids for instance, lasted a pretty good long time...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
They did, they did.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Film doesn't last that long.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
No, it doesn't.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
If there was a piece of film put in the pyramids they wouldn't be here.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Wouldn't be here, yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Unless somebody had been taking care of that film and probably duplicating it over the years, and even then film, if you try to duplicate it, loses quality each duplication, where at least with the hard drive, if you can duplicate it, a number is a number, zeros and ones stay zeros and ones, and you can duplicate them forever, and as long as you know that's a zero that was on that media, it will stay a zero forever.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Well, that's ...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
The trick is not to lose the zero...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, exactly.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
...which can happen easily, I mean my blog for the first two years is gone. I had my blog on UserLand servers, and (Inaudible) UserLand, and UserLand decided to pull the plug on the server and not give me a backup, not tell me, and I didn't have a backup because I was stupid, but stupidity causes loss of data, right? I really didn't care, I was like...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
There is this kind of element...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
It's a blog.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Its not important, but a hundred years for now it might be very important for somebody to go back and read. So now the Internet is incomplete, right? That's something done for the Internet, not for printed page stuck in the library like a Book of Kells in Dublin, Ireland.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Well, I think you're right. I mean we have this culture that is, on the one hand we have a greater opportunity now to capture it and save it, and on the other hand, digital objects are fragile in a way that often paper isn't, and so that promise of being able to make a perfect copy, of being able to make multiple copies, to have those multiple copies stored on multiple continents, and to have them 100 different copyright regimes I think is very exciting. There was a report that UN did a few years ago about library burnings in the 20th Century, and its surprising, there have been these huge fires that have just destroyed irreplaceable artifact. I mean even Iraq, I think we saw some bad things happened just recently and that promise of having some version of them in individual form and in more then one location is very exciting.

Again, governments tend to burn libraries and one of the things that I can imagine in my dark moments is, you look at some of the copyright restrictions that are being placed on things and that is in effect a form of torturing a library of information. YouTube just took -- well, YouTube just took down 30,000 video clips, right?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
You know YouTube is an -- real archivist would say, YouTube isn't a real archive, because its not designed for a long term preservation or a long term access, and it doesn't have the kind of cataloging that would be done, there's a whole list of things that people wouldn't say, cause it not to qualify as an archive, but there is this gray area and its a big deal because Copyright Laws are now being reexamined, in fact to look specifically at copyright exemptions for libraries, museums, and archives. So there's something called Section 108 of the Copyright Law that gives libraries and archives the ability to handle material a little differently than a commercial organization would and part of the, one only...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, publisher can't go and say, well, the CL library doesn't have the right to hand out my books.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Exactly. There's this effort to the groups that's working on Section 108, has a lot of commercial representatives in it and they want to define what a library and an archive is more and more and more narrowly, so that that exemption applies to fewer and fewer people. So, for them there's no question that something like YouTube should never be considered as anything like a library or an archive and yet, for you or for me, if we want to go see what happened...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, in fairness, YouTube has ads on it, right?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
In my library I don't see ads, not the ones I go to.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Oh yeah, not typically.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
There might be an ad somewhere, but generally there's no advertising, and when you open the book, there's no ads and the library hasn't stuck an ad in the book and YouTube is completely on the commercial side of the fence, right?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
This idea of growing a community through infringement is interesting. I mean there is sort of the distinction that Tim Wu at Colombia has been pushing that there is material that's truly been cleared and out on the Internet. There is material that is clearly infringing and people want it taken down and they're just taking it down. There's this gray area of tolerated content, where it exist is out there but a rights holder could come along say, "Well, now I want you take it down". So that's an interesting way of separating out that issue.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, where do we go with this, what's your action item for people watching our conversation, what do you want us to do or not to?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Okay, well, that's a good -- that's a great question. I guess the first thing would be, we do need to have an open discussion about this. We need to have transparency in the agreements that are being made between our public institutions and commercial concerns.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is there a good place to do that, to have that kind of conversation, is there a organization that's trying to take this conversation and let it happen or?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
I think there are several. I think the Open Content Alliance is one, I think the American Library Association is another, I think The Association of Moving Image Archivists is another. They all have lists, they have specialty discussions, (Inaudible) information has also been very good. So, one is to think through the public-private partnerships, how they should work. So, this particularly goes to very senior people in the academic and library world, if you're the Provost of the University and you have a commercial organization knocking on your door, it's wrong to think that one particular company is a future, and that if you partner with that one company, your institution will have -- taken care of it's obligations as a digital library.

So, that's one high level consideration. Another is maybe reevaluation of institutional priorities. The worldwide library budget is about $31 billion, that's what's spent on libraries worldwide, and really a pretty small fraction of that, if it were diverted into digitization, could make what's in libraries much more accessible, which is I think enormously cool. Third would be to think about values. I think non-exclusivity and transparency, and don't sign that NDA when they come knocking on the door if you're a custodian of cultural materials, you really have to think before signing that NDA.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, at least have an open public process, right?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Let people know hey, I'm thinking of signing this NDA, let's have an open and public process. If its with Google or Microsoft, let the other companies at least get involved in the conversation, so they can openly bid on your -- and there will be other ones, its not just the big three, like you said a film company wants to have access to the stuff exclusively because that turns into commercial value later on.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
One of the interesting discussions...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Just put it up on eBay and let people know -- but doing transparently you cause people to bid on things and that causes your deal to go better anyways.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
One of the things that's funny, so The Library of Congress is accountable to people, to elected representatives, and they tend to hear from people on the commercial side much more than they do from people in research and education. So, the only wining argument on Capitol Hill now against continued extension of copyright restrictions is really the research and education argument, that's the only one that can really be heard up there. So I think people who are in research and education world, or who have kids in school, need to think about activism. There's a hearing coming up in Chicago on Section 108 that looks at the copyright exemptions for libraries, museums and archives. If you think back to the great moments of the 20th Century or the second half of the 20th Century, most of them were on television and most of them you can't see. One of the things that got me riled up early and this was -- I went looking for -- do you remember the debate between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown in 1992, so basically...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I think so, remind me a little bit.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
So, basically what happened was Rodney King got stopped, he got beaten, somebody got it on video. The cops who did it were initially acquitted and there were riots in Los Angeles, more than 50 people were killed in those riots. At the end of this, our Vice President, Dan Quayle, stood up over in San Francisco, and he said, "Well, the real reason this all happened is because of single mothers like Murphy Brown", who was this TV character.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Oh gees, I remember now.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
So, it's not economic and equality, its not racism, its not bad actions on the part of police, it's those single mothers and those bad Hollywood values. So, it was huge, it was a front story running for a while, and it ran in newspapers, and it ran on television. I went back and I tried to find, well, what's the original source material, if you wanted to reconstruct this dialog, which was about major riots in Los Angeles and about race, class, gender, the shape of American families, I mean something that's clearly important to historians, to people that are teaching social science, to people that are teaching media, could you reconstruct the dialog? I went out and I started taking to media librarians and they all just laughed at me, because they said, "You're never going to get that stuff." In fact, they were right. I went and I tried to buy the original clip of Dan Quayle speaking, he was talking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco and that material had been transferred to Hoover.

Hoover wrote me back and said "Well, you know we're in midst of digitizing it but we couldn't give it to you anyway, it's copyrighted". I went to Warner and I said, "Hey, I want to use this in a classroom". They said, "Well, if you have a copy of it, you might be able to use it in the classroom, but we're not going to give you one." This was before they started republishing Murphy. I went to the major news networks and I tried to buy clips, and a lot of them were willing to sell, but often it was really expensive, like $20 a second to show something in the classroom. So, here is this major event and I could go, and I could go look in the newspaper and I could read all about it, but I couldn't see it on television, and the television is much more engaging and...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Inspirational source of information. We all know that as things get transferred through different accounts, the story gets changed or you don't hear the whole thing.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Exactly.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
You want to go back and study what actually happened based on the original source material...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
And you can't do it.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I even noticed this with a lot of newspapers, they'll leave the story out for free for a week, and then that will go behind a content barrier where you have to register, or even worse, you have to register and pay a subscription fee or something just to look at it, and that doesn't even give you the right to use it in some other context.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, exactly.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Certainly it doesn't let you search on it anymore, because now Google stops working or Yahoo! or MSN, because it's all behind a paid firewall and now you can't even find it because everything's behind these firewalls.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, it's really kind of sad because we could all win, I mean the stuff could be made more accessible, there are ways of finding it. Think of all the stuff at PBS, there's been tens of millions of dollars spend on PBS programming over the years and a lot of that isn't available. I mean you probably see the eyes on the price thing (Inaudible), the seminal documentary on the civil rights era, filled with clips that have been licensed for ten years, because the production company that did the work was really running on a shoestring and then re-clearing those rights to even figure out how I think the Ford Foundation gave a grant. I want to say on the order of $60,000 just to go through and pick it (ph) out, who do we need to ask?

So, there's this funny thing of like, on the one hand you have rights holders that are insisting that before you touch my stuff, I want you to ask me about it, and on the other hand it's the rights lobby that destroyed the registration system that used to exist to make that at least half way possible. So now, even if you want to go, and this was part of my experience with Murphy Brown, if you want to go and you want to find the rights holder, that's really hard to do even if you want to know who to ask and (Voice Overlap).

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
A lot of people don't realize this. Even Martin Luther King's speech, you have to get paid for by the King family, right? I know a friend who was doing a video game and wanted to use that speech, and it was a pain in the ass and very expensive, and you have to convince them that it's for a good social purpose, you can't use it in a game that might be -- not for good social purpose.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
It's not going to be (Inaudible), right?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Right, exactly. So they really control the image of that speech, and a lot of people don't even realize that until they get involved with a business or with an organization that tries to use that footage for something.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, so a lot of our heritage is really locked up right now, and when it's locked up like that, there is a lot less incentive to preserve it. So, there was a study that was done in Europe and...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, there is if you have a speech worth money.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Sure, good for sure.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
The King family is going to keep that speech around because people are willing to pay money for that speech. There's a 100,000 speeches where, like you said, there is not much economic incentive to keep that speech around.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
It's really sad, I mean the European study, (Inaudible) Space, suggested that something like two-thirds of video, of all the stuff that's on video now could be gone in 20 plus years because its -- even though it's on shelf.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, newspapers in the next 30 years, newspapers are going to start going out, we already are in a place where there is, most big cities only have one newspaper, right? There used to be two or three, and those big newspapers are under severe financial pressure right now, that sounds like Mercury News which is a big newspaper here in the Bay Area, is laying off people and their business model is disappearing. So, are they going to be in the place to keep their archives around in 30 or 40 years? I don't know.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
That's a really good point, that's a really good point.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
All that history is going to -- let's say that Mercury News went out off business, God forbid, where does the -- and how do you pay for an archive, because those things are huge.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
They are.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Even in my college newspaper, our archive took a whole room, and that takes money, it takes resources away from some other purpose that could be used...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
It's a hard case.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
...in another way.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
It's surprisingly hard, I mean pulling jewels out of archive and saying look, here is something that happened two out of three of the networks released their moon landing footage, it's video tape and they just (Inaudible) There's a lot of Johnny Carson that's gone, KRON, the station over in San Francisco is having financial problems and their archive is not in good shape. Some of the people who are producers and cared about things there have scrolled away the best of it. I mean that's not an institutional response, and you go through and they've got all kinds of great things that happen in San Francisco over the last 40 years, but it's not easily assessable. That's kind of this promise of digitizing things and that's why this public-private partnerships could be so cool with just a little bit, a little bit of a course correction, and I think the urge on the part of the commercial entities to want to preserve their ability to turn a big profit on this stuff, is part of the reason.

We all don't -- none of us knows what this world is going to look like in 10, or 20, or 30 years, and so that urge to like, let me lock down as many rights for myself as I can right now, prohibits things from happening like being able to go through and crawl that information or being able to go through and look at it. Google goes out and reads everything that's on the net. If you want access to the material that they put on their servers, that they've scanned, well, you're not quite as free to do that as they believe they are to go look at your material. So, there's a little lack of symmetry there that would be nice to see change on their part.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, Google and Microsoft and Yahoo!, they're advertisement companies really, they're not library companies, they're not even search companies.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
We shouldn't (Voice Overlap) them.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Google's hype for the first few years was it was a search company. Well no, it's an advertising distribution company now. So the mentality of the people working there is going to be driven by that, where their pay checks come from, not from caring about the content that goes through there, they care more about the ads.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
I think there's this distinction, I mean there maybe people at the top of an organization that care very deeply about universal access to human knowledge, but then on the day to day thing, where there's an army of business development (Inaudible), people that have been hired to go out and get the best deal for the company, are going to be evaluated on that kind of performance, there's a little bit of a disconnect there. With all the best will in the world, things may go on the direction.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, you know evil is...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
It's a funny term.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, I used to make fun of it. When I worked at Microsoft, two kids stole our evil, we want it back. At least the big three have the resources to keep these data centers up and running, and they're not going to unplug a server just because they're under financial pressure, at least in the next few years, maybe 50 years from now that will be a different story, but certainly right now, they have the societies resources. I think they have the responsibility because they have those resources to keep our stuff around.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Well, I mean that's why -- there are these institutions that are designed to be long term and to last forever, and commercial organization aren't really -- there is a company that's doing personal archives, which I think is a tremendously interesting business opportunity for someone to go after. On the one hand they have...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is that going to be seen as the new -- remember how in 70s or even 80s, if somebody had a family encyclopedia, that was a status, are we going to have like, where is your family archive, is that going to be the status?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Maybe, I don't know.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Certainly, some of the rich people have these data centers in their house now. One guy who was pretty rich said, I have ten terabyte of storage in my house, I was like, yeah, I want that too. Certainly, my sponsor -- disclosure here, I'm sponsored by Seagate, and they'd love to sell you a few hard drives to put in your house, right?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Well, I think Seagate has this great opportunity to start figuring out how to make disks last a long time, how to have archival hard disks, because right now its 1% of your failure rate, 2% of your failure rate -- well, if your Mac stores more than that, I don't about Seagate, but...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
They're certainly pushing RAID drives, so if that drive fails, you have it backed up, and also offsite storage. They just bought a -- they just bought a company, I'm forgetting who they bought, but they're buying a bunch of backup companies, so that you could store stuff on the Internet.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
That makes it easy.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Also, you have a local storage backup, so you hook up a device, set it on, it automatically backs up, your (Voice Overlap), your PCs.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
I mean it's funny like, these problems that have been around a long time, they seem like they're essential. Backup is one, I think calendar is another, and I just say well, I want to backup my data, or I want to organize my calendar with the couple of people, and it turns out those are really hard problems for some reason that's hard to articulate but I think...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Its money, to backup things, cost money and time and people are...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Too cheap?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, whenever there's money involved it's like, why do I need to buy two hard drives to make a RAID drive, when one seems to work just fine. I think the reliability on our modern day equipment is lowing people into that kind of -- when I started computers, they crashed every hour. Now, I haven't had a crash in weeks on either my Mac or Windows system. So, it lulls you into sleep until a drive finally boom, and usually it's a theft, but you rarely get -- your laptop just disappears. I got a friend who works at Yahoo!, and their apartment was broken into and all their computer equipment were stolen, they lost all their photos, all their digital documents, everything, and all their passwords, because now somebody can start that thing up and go (Inaudible) their lives.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, there's security issue there too.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, it's something that this industry hasn't really...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Grappled with.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, it's hard to sell it to people, and it's hard to get people to think about that one. They're going into Best Buyer price and buying a laptop. How are you going to back this (Inaudible) up? How are you going to keep the bad guys out of it if it gets stolen, there is nobody -- no sales person sits down and talks to you about that.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, well I would certainly pay money for something better than what I'm doing.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
But, you and I are weird.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, that's true.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
We're weird just because we're here in Silicon Valley, I mean that automatically marks you for the weird checks by your name.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
You're totally right. I mean again, I make the mistake of generalizing from my own taste or experience, probably (Voice Overlap) that thing.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, anyways, anything else we should -- on copyrights and libraries and (Voice Overlap)?

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
So, we did copyrights, we did libraries, we did public-private partnerships, we did action video, few action items, I wish I were a little better at articulating those.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Part of it is just putting it out there, so you'd start a conversation with people, that's what's nice about the new style. It used to be -- I would be a reporter and write this up and then that would be it. I would use two paragraphs of what you told me. Now, people can see the whole conversation and they can add onto the conversation and write underneath with comment of their own, or a link to something else, whereas the Blog Post, it might generate a Blog Post that somebody rips on what we say and starts their own campaign.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
I think what you said about money is actually true in this sense too, it's almost like patronage is what's making -- is making a lot of the archival world function. The Library of Congress has its giant mountain in (Inaudible) Virginia, and it used to be where the Federal Reserve had currency stored for use after a nuclear war. David, well -- David Packard's son has gotten inspired to give them $200 million to preserve film there and other moving images and sound recordings, but they've got vaults and they're opening up this spring. It's odd, isn't it, that it is a private person with a deep interest in preserving cultural materials rather than our public institution that's stepping up to fund the creation of what's going to be I think one of the biggest archives for sound and motion.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, I've talked with James Billington, and he's a smart guy, he's the guy who runs The Library Of Congress, he's one of the brightest people I have ever met and...

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
(Inaudible).

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, I rode in a car on the way to the Google's Zeitgeist Conference, it was awesome. I think he'll do the right thing for us.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Yeah, well, he needs more money. So we need to...

Robert Scoble -- ScobleShow
He did tell us that. He also has a lot of constraints. He can't just do a Blog for instance, and I said, "Why not?" He's like, "Well, I have all these Senators and Congress people, and if I write the wrong thing and (Voice Overlap) it causes mess, and get a political thing going." That's part of the unfortunate thing too, that these people really can't share what they're doing or what they're thinking about, because the political -- now, that's a different case then in another library, that's not so politicized. He certainly has very strict guidelines based on, that it's a political organization. The Library of Congress isn't political but it's controlled by political organizations, and if he does something wrong then all of a sudden Congresses and Senates are having hearings and start doing all sorts of nasty stuff.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
You might hurt Disney if you do that Mr. Billington. That's interesting, I hadn't heard that, but trust me is a weird answer, we're hearing it from a lot of people. I mean the big institutions, when they sign the NDA say, "Trust me", and Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in a sense say, "Trust me", and I think the publishers in a way are saying, "Well, trust us, we represent the cultural creative, and we have -- we're the trusted intermediary between the guy and the garret and the market, and I don't know if that's a good enough answer anymore.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Oh no, that's a good place to end.

Jeff Ubois - AMIA
Thank you very much.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Interesting conversation....