The Universal Public Library
We have the technological ability to create the largest and most substantive public library in the history of humanity.
A universal public library that anyone can access on the internet.
Streaming on-demand. Reading on-demand. Everything, by everyone. Ever. Free to use.
There is no software barrier. There is no hardware barrier. There are only abstract legal barriers created by the copyright industry on behalf of the 5 corporations that own everything.
A library that literally has a copy of every available and known book, in every language, every television show, every research paper, every documentary, every film, every video game, all music, available on-command to everyone, on the existing devices already in our homes.
It’s such a natural idea that it would happen if we just stopped criminalizing the people who already do it. But we could go further if we had people, and eventually, governments, willing to call the corporations’ bluff. You can’t own access to our shared culture, and you especially can’t own it indefinitely. You can’t own a dead man’s music. Get real.
It’s true that we artists need to be paid, but we artists also need art. We need knowledge. We need music. When it comes to individual artists, it would make every single one of us richer. We would have a massive chunk of essential expenses as an artist wiped off our books. It would make us richer than rich, because we could access materials that simply would not have ever been available for purchase.
Every single person on earth could be made incomparably richer, incomparably deeper, better informed, and have more access to the things which make us human and which allow us to develop into ourselves by just ceasing to criminalize the building of intellectual and cultural commons.
As a practical matter, starting with a legal protection limiting the distribution of new material in the universal digital library for a period of five years seems reasonable to me to help ensure our current arts & culture funding model can adapt to the new conditions.
Firms would have to adjust, but they could survive and thrive easily because this long-term fictional intellectual asset isn’t actually where their core profitability comes from. It’s a known fact that most profits on any piece are made in the first handful of years, not over the long term.
Everyone on earth, especially we artists, have cultural and intellectual gains to make from this proposal that honestly defies description. The universal library could make us all richer than rich, and truly unlock the incredible power of common knowledge for the first time in our short history as a species.
