A reader emails about convergence creeping in at Project Gutenberg:
For some time now, I’ve been a volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders (DP), which is the main site providing public domain e-books for Project Gutenberg. I had hoped this project would be somewhat immune to convergence as its mission is to preserve any and all works of literature in the public domain.
However, today the CEO of Project Gutenberg, Gregory Newby, published a notice in the forums for Distributed Proofreaders:
We recently updated the website with information about submitting public domain works to Project Gutenberg. There are two notable changes. The more important change, to me, is to firmly write that PG only accepts works in the public domain in the US. Historically, we’ve added a reasonable quantity of copyrighted works (perhaps a few {20631733b5a15c3694dbfcf360b60a1948a54005354f1d1bb00d126531fe1735}). But now, we send copyrighted submissions to http://self.gutenberg.org .. this change isn’t impactful to DP, since DP, also works exclusively with public domain works (with very few exceptions). The rationale for being firm about PD-only is twofold. Mainly, because there are many ways a contemporary author can distribute his or her works on the Internet (in the olden days, PG was one of few eBook outlets that would accept contemporary works for free, unlimited redistribution). Secondarily, because we were never very good at it: we don’t offer many services to authors, including the ability to post improvements, different formats, get stats on their readers, etc.
The other notable change is more impactful for DP, though still rarely an issue. This is to be more explicit about not wanting items that are hate speech or predecessors to hate speech, or items that are pornographic and obscene.
Hate speech or “predecessors to hate speech”? The latter is a new one for me. Fortunately, there was a speedy and overwhelming backlash… this time.
After a large outcry by the volunteers at Distributed Proofreading, the CEO of Project Gutenberg was essentially forced to walk back his decision and remove the language banning “hate speech” from the Gutenberg terms & conditions. He’s now pledged to uphold an open collection policy.
He needs to be forced out anyhow, though. Because he’s shown that he’s more than willing to cuck, given that he already did so without even coming under any external pressure.