Brewster Kahle Quotes

The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people would feel that it's their property, so to speak.

The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good.

If Google Books is successful, others will follow.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.

Once a discovery has been published, there is no way of un-publishing it.

Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.

Software is becoming no different than a videotape or a record album or a paperback book, and not all of us are ready for that change.

By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.

Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries.

The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.

I think we did a great job of putting together a program that would have made good e-books available had people been buying e-books in any real numbers.

If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.

I think that the balance needs to be restored, and I would note that in the camp in which I am in, one finds libraries, universities, the Internet industry, the manufacturers of digital media, and consumers.

The great thing about having digital comics is that it is like having a comic-book shop on your digital device. It has turned comics from a destination buy to an impulse buy.

Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.

Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

We see ourselves as the world's digital library. That can be a lot more than books. We do want to expand to other types of content: sheet music, magazines, user-generated content.

A brainy person does not abuse copyright; instead they respect it and uphold it.

Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.

The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC.

It is our goal to provide full public access to as many files as we possibly can.

If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing

I like to compare 'Instagram' to the Library of Congress.