Judges will be looking for videos that are fun, interesting and use public domain materials, especially those from 1927. They will be shown at the in-person Public Domain Day party and should highlight the value of having cultural materials that can be reused, remixed, and re-contextualized for a new day. Winners’ pieces will be purchased with the prize money, and viewable on the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons license.
Amir Saber Esfahani (Director of Special Arts Projects, Internet Archive)
Rick Prelinger (Board Member, Internet Archive, Founder, Prelinger Archives)
Yuanxiao Xu (Deputy Counsel, Creative Commons)
Previous Winners:
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What is the Democracy’s Library?
Posted on November 30, 2022 by Brewster Kahle
Illustration created with MidJourney
citizenry to flourish– and because of this, Democratic governments, at all levels, spend billions of dollars publishing reports, manuals, books, videos so that all can read and learn. That is the good news. The bad news is that in our digital age, much of this is not accessible. Democracy’s Library aims to change this.
The aim of the Internet Archive Democracy’s Library is to collect, preserve accurate cleaned numbers list from frist database and make freely available all the published works of all the democracies– the federal, provincial, and municipal government publications– so that we can efficiently learn from each other to solve our biggest challenges in parallel and in concert.
Democracy’s Library is the foundational information of free people.
We call this “Democracy’s Library” because Democracy is an open system that trusts its citizens to learn, grow and have independent agency. Democratic governments publish openly because they want important information spread widely. There are no paywalls to the works of government, or there shouldn’t be.
We need access to all the River reports so we can help understand and manage our declining clean water. Access to Agricultural research to help farm more sustainably. To Materials research to build better products and devices. To Local hearings on project results so other cities can overcome the same challenges. To Training materials and text books for many professions. All free– and in ways you can find them.
Bringing free public access to the public domain is the opportunity of the Internet– an infrastructure that effectively costs nothing to distribute information that has been collected and organized.
Yes, this will cost a small fortune– but it is within our grasp– to collect and organize billions of documents and datasets, preserve the materials for the ages and make them available for many purposes. While scoping projects in the United States and Canada have now begun, we estimate this project will cost at least $100 million dollars. The big money has not been committed yet, and we’re still fundraising. But to get things kicked off, Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW), are supporting the project. The Internet Archive has ramped up collecting government websites and datasets as well as digitizing print materials with many library partners.