How I lost the Big One - Lawrence Lessig

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How I lost the Big One - Lawrence Lessig

IT IS OVER A YEAR LATER AS I WRITE THESE WORDS. It is still astonishingly hard. If you know anything at all about this story, you know that we lost the appeal. And if you know something more than just the minimum, you probably think there was no way this case could have been won. After our defeat, I received literally thousands of missives by well-wishers and supporters, thanking me for my work on behalf of this noble but doomed cause. And none from this pile was more significant to me than the e-mail from my client, Eric Eldred.

But my client and these friends were wrong. This case could have been won. It should have been won. And no matter how hard I try to retell this story to myself, I can't help believing that my own mistake lost it.

ERIC ELDRED, A RETIRED COMPUTER PROGRAMMER in New Hampshire, was frustrated that his daughters didn't seem to like Nathaniel Hawthorne. And in 1995, he decided to do something about it: put Hawthorne on the web. An electronic version with links to pictures and explanatory text, Eldred thought, would make this 19th-century work come alive.

It didn't work—at least for his daughters. They didn't find Hawthorne any more interesting than before. But Eldred's experiment gave birth to a hobby, and his hobby begat a cause. Eldred went on to build a library of public-domain works by scanning these works and making them available for free.

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How I lost the Big One - Lawrence Lessig