The Internet, Libraries, and the Public Record

"It is both a pity and a sign of the times that the libraries do not have recordings of both conventions for the civic review," writes Andrea Antulov in the Letters to the Editor section of our local Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. "I urge your readers to demand they ensure citizens have plentiful and easy access to historial, journalistic and civic records. After all, that was the purpose of libraries' creation, to ensure a literate, informed citizenship without regard to social class in order to protect democracy."

NPR has published RealAudio archives of the convention speeches on NPR.org, so anyone with an Internet connection (or who can visit the public library where they have a connection) can listen. Here they are:

Republican National Convention:

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3877883 (Day One)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3882508 (Day Two)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3885136 (Day Three)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3887311 (Day Four)

Democratic National Convention:

http://www.npr.org/politics/convention2004/dnc_schedule.html (All four days)

This is great but...we don't know if these URLs will be valid four years from now. All audio is encoded in RealAudio streaming format, meaning that without, ahem, special tools you can't download and save the audio. It's part of the public record, but the audio files aren't in the public domain. I kind of thought they should be, so I asked Robert Spier at NPR.org what would be the reaction if someone made local copies of these speeches, solely for the purpose of public enlightenment. Here is the reply from our email correspondence:

Jack,

Here is what our Counsel's office offers in reply to your question from last week. Seems pretty clearcut.

Best.

Robert Spier
NPR Online Station Services
202.513.2448 rspier@npr.org

Love NPR? Support your local station: http://www.npr.org/stations/index.php

This would be very problematic for several reasons, including: (1) I don't think any of the speeches qualify as works of the United States government (even the speeches by public officials), and thus they probably aren't in the public domain, (2) music rights issues, (3) I think we got some audio from a "pool" so there is a question of rights in the recordings, and (4) there may be some conditions from the convention halls or RNC and DNC that I don't know about.

I like and respect Robert Spier, but I had to reply that it's clearcut in no way at all. I won't knowingly violate anyone's copyrights, which leaves me in a tough spot if I want to "ensure a literate, informed citizenship without regard to social class in order to protect democracy."

Did I mention how many people searched my web site looking for MP3s of the Barack Obama speech? I'd like to make this stuff available, and I don't care if it's on my site or yours. I think we should be in this literate informed citizenship business together, but we can't publish the goods because we don't know what the rules are. So what's a brother to do?

With the Internet we now have the technical means to create a vastly useful digital library. I understand that the CNNs of the world want to protect their proprietary work and get paid. But in the public media universe, we're not serving a private interest but a public good. If we're going to make the public broadcasting web useful for citizenship and democracy, we need to view it less as a gated community and more as a public library. And stock the shelves as best we can.