10 Rules for Radicals
back, they agreed not to post it on-line for 5 years. There was a weird arrangement where the government got some kind of royalty from Amazon, but the royalty was after they deducted "ingestion fees" for scanning the videos. The government was paying for the digitization, but wasn't allowed to use the material.
I asked the Chief of Staff of the National Archives how much these royalties they were getting were, and it turned out to be—in 2 years of operation of this partnership—a total of $3,273.66.
This seemed nuts. So, I forked over $251 and bought 20 DVDs from Amazon and posted them in all the usual places. Some great stuff, like footage of Richard Nixon in the White House, explaining why he was innocent of any wrongdoing.
Then, I wrote to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing and he posted a note telling all the happy mutants that if they watched Richard Nixon on YouTube, they could help save the public domain because we were counting all the views to show members of Congress that people really care about this stuff.
"Watch Richard Nixon, help save the public domain."
The next day, I sent another $461 to Amazon and ordered another 28 videos, and that led to another Boing Boing post, "Watch the Bob Hope Christmas Special and Help Save the Public Domain."
By the time I testified before Congress on December 16, we were able to show more online views for these 48 videos than the total unit sales from the Amazon program over two years. The message was pretty clear: the Amazon
