[mastazi]

RIP. Project Gutenberg and IMSLP are two of my favourite websites. Every January, when new works enter the public domain, I go and download a bunch of books and sheet music. HN readers, let's not forget to donate to these websites that keep the Internet worth surfing.

[zozbot234]

While new works do trickle into the public domain every year, it's worth noting that copyright status is not currently the main bottleneck to public domain cultural works being made widely available to the public under F.A.I.R. (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. There's a huge amount of extant literature and music in the public domain that someone has scanned and perhaps put up online as raw page images, but no one took the effort to transcribe/index/classify it yet and thus make it easily available for most uses - such that it might as well not exist as far as most people are concerned. This is where efforts like Project Gutenberg can be especially valuable.

[kragen]

That's true, but its framing sort of rests on an assumption of fungibility that doesn't really hold. There are many important cultural works whose copyright status is currently the main bottleneck to their being made widely available to the public.

Part of why this happens is that, in any medium, most works aren't very popular. A few years ago, someone who worked at YouTube told me that more than half of YouTube videos had zero views — not even the uploader had watched the video on the site. Most blogs have only one reader or a few readers. Most software projects have only one user.

Look at the things that someone has taken the effort to transcribe/index/classify, like the 9,785 books published in English in 01927 with full view available on the Hathi Trust website whose titles contain the word "A": https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?adv=1&setft=true&...

• The trustee and the A. L. A.

• The influence of hydrogen ion acitivity upon the stability of vitamin A

• The national cyclopedia of American biography : Current volumes A-

• A study of English drama on the stage / by Walter Prichard Eaton.

• The nations of the world : a pageant designed to show their contributions to civilization / prepared by the faculty of Public school 53, Buffalo, New York ; illustrated

• A book of shanties

• A book of prefaces / by H. L. Mencken

• A January birthday party / by Jack Bechdolt & George Illian

This last is a sort of instruction manual for throwing children's birthday parties. In January. It includes things like a cake recipe, suggested menus ("Hot Fricasseed Chicken. Hot Biscuits. Cranberry Sauce. Birthday Cake. Ice Cream. Chocolate Milk Shake. Candies. Nuts.") and tips for hanging crepe paper from plaster walls into which you cannot drive a nail or screw.

This kind of schlock, in aggregate, is immensely valuable as a window into how life has changed over the past century, but this particular book is extremely replaceable. If you were allocating limited resources to providing access to either A January Birthday Party or something like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone it would be criminal to choose the former over the latter.

Yet that is what the current copyright laws require us to do.

This is not to deprecate Jack Bechdolt and George Illian; writing a schlocky easy-craft-tips newspaper column or book with cake recipes and unoriginal children's game ideas is a perfectly fine way to spend your time, much like baking a trout or unclogging a toilet. Surely publishing the book was, overall, beneficial to society, even if only slightly. Nothing suggests that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bechdolt or https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52156792 was anything other than a perfectly decent person. But that doesn't mean that preservation of the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.

I'd say that about 90% of the items in the Hathi Trust query result I linked above are of similarly insignificant value.

Even cultural works that have some enduring value on their own (I suspect The national cyclopedia of American biography and A book of shanties fall in this category) are not fungible with unavailable ones—no quantity of books of 19th-century folk tales forms an adequate substitute for the second edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms¹, nor vice versa.

______

¹ I was dismayed to be unable to find the second edition when I was writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571196 the other day, and I believe that this problem is mostly a result of its copyright status.

[zozbot234]

> But that doesn't mean that ... the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.

Why not? What's a more likely question to an AI that might have been trained on these books: "Tell me some ideas for my kid's birthday party next January" or "Write out a huge book-length story about a magical school for wizards?" I surmise that the former is a lot more likely to happen than the latter. "Harry Potter" is just pure ephemera. Nobody will find it worthwhile in 200 years.

[kragen]

For a couple of different reasons.

The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book. Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are things about her books that could be better, but reading them has been an extremely popular activity since they were first published. I suspect that, if there are people in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do today. But there are still people reading works first published 200 years ago today, even fictional works. Pride and Prejudice was published in 01813, Frankenstein was first published in 01818, Rip Van Winkle was published in 01819, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 01820, The Last of the Mohicans was published in 01826, Self-Reliance was published in 01841, The Cask of Amontillado was published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn't rise to the level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.

The second is that the humans, unable to think about the world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors from the stories that other humans tell, which are necessarily more or less fictional, even when they attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding those stories. Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves; and its influence will continue as long as there are people.

If you want to understand how English-speaking people thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you should read Frankenstein, among other things. And if someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think today, they should also read Harry Potter.

This is obvious sometimes when people use words from the books—Muggles, horcrux, mudblood—but it also happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way.

Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of importance.

[lukan]

" Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves"

I did read the books, but I don't think I have really encountered the use of "Muggles, horcrux, mudblood" in every day life, nor do I personally feel they shaped my metaphors or narratives on how I see the world. Frankenstein is much more catchy for the metaphor of the man made monster for example. What does Harry Potter stands for?

[kragen]

The young woman I was standing behind at the bus stop tonight had the Deathly Hallows logo tattooed on her harm.

What does Harry Potter represent? You can't replace a book-length narrative with a short phrase.

[coderatlarge]

i don’t have a strong view either way, but as a data point: I've heard the word “muggle” used in casual conversation and i don’t run in circles where harry potter is considered required reading.

[gabriel666smith]

>Harry Potter('s)... influence will continue as long as there are people.

That was a fun sentence!

What do you see as being the predominant, near-universal metaphors and narratives supplied by Rambo? That's an absolutely fascinating point of view.

[kragen]

I haven't watched it, so I may not be the best person to answer that.

However, I remember in about 01990 seeing an episode of Alien Nation (also fictional) reference a famous scene from it as one of the extraterrestrial characters is struggling to assimilate into human culture and construct a gender identity for himself (https://subslikescript.com/series/Alien_Nation-96531/season-... https://youtu.be/AqiPbBxLpNU):

> Like some Newcomer men. They don't feel truly masculine until after they've given birth.

> I'm afraid, George, that giving birth doesn't quite cut it. You ever see movies? Remember Sylvester Stallone? That beefy fellow with the headband, always had a big gun? Remember that scene in First Blood when Stallone falls off a cliff? He has this huge gash in his arm and he sews himself up. See, that's considered being a man.

> Tell you the truth, Matt, I find his movies simplistic. Why does everything have to be so complicated with you?

Later in the script the extraterrestrial references this in an unintentionally hilarious way, provoking a concerned response from IIRC his wife:

> If I wanted I could fall off a cliff and sew myself up.

> George, have you had your lead supplements today?

Aside from its lampshaded effect on popular US conceptions of masculinity in general, the Rambo fantasy seems to have been so popular among, uh, boys who like to cosplay as soldiers, that the knife featured in the movie became the dominant form of cosplay knife for many years, if we believe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n3QiP5LNDE. Some poorly-thought-out regulation here in Argentina has criminalized the possession of knives made to look similar, specifically having a sawblade on the back.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/FirstBlood1982 discusses some of the popular literary tropes that appear in it, including "Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene" (which affected the popular perception of Vietnam veterans such as the fictional protagonist); "Affably Evil", in a context that some people think of whenever they hear about a police manhunt on the news; "Asshole Victim", in which the most unpleasant person coincidentally suffers great misfortune; "Break the Haughty", in which the arrogant sheriff turns out to be a coward; "Trauma Button", whose shallow depiction of PTSD was the pattern for the popular understanding of PTSD for many years; and of course "Invincible Hero".

A lot of these are not "near-universal" in the sense of "applicable in nearly every situation", but they are "near-universal" in the sense that everybody has either seen the movie, or seen other movies made by people who were influenced by the movie, or heard stories from people who were influenced by one of those movies, etc.

Some of them are applicable in nearly every situation. Whenever someone thinks that bad things won't happen to them because they're a nice person, for example, they're unconsciously believing in the puddle of ideas around "Asshole Victim", and Rambo's instance is just one drop of blood in that puddle. More insidiously, when people learn that someone has suffered misfortune, "Asshole Victim" subconsciously prompts them to search for reasons they deserved it.

Of course it's easiest for me to identify the thought-patterns that result from tropes I dissent from, not the ones that reflect (as I misunderstand it) Reality.

[eszed]

No comment on the rest of the list, but anything by H. L. Mencken is likely to be a banger.

[kragen]

Yeah, it's probably more enjoyable than the rest of that list put together. Still, prefaces? Generally I try to avoid reading those.

[eszed]

Heh. That's why I'm intrigued by it! My bet is that it's some kind of satire based on that (almost universal) avoidance. Regardless, Mencken's wicked clever, and less-known than I think he deserves to be.

[kragen]

Comedy is often somewhat dependent on shared cultural assumptions, although that Sumerian fart joke is still kind of funny.

[ipaddr]

I find the no views on half of youtube videos to be difficult to accept unless counting non-public. If we filtered for a 5 seconds + perhaps that would fix that.

I would if youtube would prune anything without a view in the future.

[kragen]

Well, of course, you've never seen any of the videos that have zero views, and you're more than a million times less likely to see a video with one view than a video with a million views. Definitely the YouTube recommender will recommend it at least a million times less often, and I suspect much more than that.

This kind of selection bias pops up in a lot of contexts. When you ride the bus, for example, you're disproportionately more likely to be on a bus that's over half full than on a bus that's mostly empty. And most of your friends probably have more friends than you do. (Not just you. I'm not saying you're unfriendly or asocial. It's true for most people.)

The guy I was talking to, on the other hand, could just run a database query over all the videos, and he did.

It's possible that YouTube has pruned those zero-views videos since I talked to him.

[kidsil]

You just opened my eyes to IMSLP and I would like to thank you for that. For years I have been chasing music scores that were just the right level for my kids.