The internet is a great place; there are people, content and organisations who make it the nice place to surf in. Some people are involved in noble projects, aimed at helping others in some way or another. One such site is Project Gutenberg. Its goal is to provide Public Domain machine readable ASCII text files (Etexts) of printed material as soon as the material becomes public domain.

This idea began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operator's of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.

Two bills have been recently introduced in Congress (fast track) that would extend all copyrights now in force for an additional 20 years (long past the lifetimes of the authors that copyright was designed to encourage). This would keep older works out of the public domain for nearly a century after publication.

For full information on the bill and why it's harmful, check out Professor Dennis Karjala's page, at http://www.public.asu.edu/~dkarjala/.

A critical report on the bill, including full text, can be found in a Hyperlaw report at http://www.essential.org/listproc/upd-discuss/msg00599.html.

A campaign is now underway to stop this bill going through. If you believe that it is wrong to keep such work away from those whom destiny or fortune has not permitted them to afford the purchase of literally material, then follow on to http://www.promo.net/pg/cplea97/.

Project Guttenberg is at http://www.promo.net/pg/.