Quote:
Originally Posted by GlenBarrington
The problem, of course, is databases like this are rarely designed for easy modification. In fact, databases built for many not for profit projects aren't designed at all, but are haphazardly slapped together over time by people with minimal knowledge of what good database design actually is!
I don't know anything about Project Gutenberg's database, but based on my experience of 30 years, I suspect it is closer to the latter than the former! All it will take to fix this, is time and money!
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The thing about Project Gutenberg is that it's always been a tiny organization. Project Gutenberg was started in the first place by Michael Hart typing the Constitution (or was it the Declaration of Independence) into a mainframe computer and emailing it to everyone on the Internet!
It was started at a time when organizations
could be smaller on the Internet, because the Internet itself was smaller, and mostly limited to the USA, without any business interests involved. It's continued on in pretty much the same vein while the Internet has grown up and become more global, commercial, and complicated all around it.
Unfortunately, that small size and simple operating strategy that served it so well back in the early days of the Internet just isn't going to work as well now. It's no longer really feasible to make material available but tell people not to download it if they shouldn't.
Gutenberg's original reaction to the suit--telling the publishers that they need to police offenders locally and not bother
them because they were providing content from the USA with a disclaimer on it--bespeaks a hope that they could just carry on operating the way they always had. The court was not impressed.
I'm not a lawyer, but this seems to be one of those cases where the Internet runs into the real world and comes off the loser. Those foreign businesses, and the law that protects them, don't care that an Internet file comes from somewhere far away in the real world. They just care that it pops up in a physical location in
their part of the world, and that's a no-no. I can't imagine that the courts are going to be that willing to entertain the idea that a foreign entity should be excused for local effects on their business just because those effects come from a
server that's nowhere near there.
Project Gutenberg is probably going to have to make some changes to how it operates in order to get along in today's globalized Internet world. Hopefully it can figure out how to do that with little enough additional time, effort, and money involved to be able to continue providing its core services.