This Little USB Holds 19,000 Indian Standards
want these to be the law. That is the entire purpose of the National Electrical Code of the United States, and they boast it is the law in all 50 states and the federal government. They want that. They sell it for a lot of money; but you know what, again, they have certification and handbooks and training. When the federal government says the National Electrical Code is the law of the land, they get the gold seal of approval of the American people; and they ought to be able to monetize that gold seal without rationing public safety information. They claim they need the money, but I don’t think that’s the reason. I think it’s a matter of control.
I think it’s the way they always did it, but you know what, the Internet has forced every industry in the world to adjust its business model. Time makes us adjust our business models. Selling a standard for a reasonable amount of money in 1970 made sense. Selling a building code, a book, for 14,000 rupees in this day and age. This thing, right. This little USB, this is all 19,000 standards. This is the whole thing. There’s no reason this shouldn’t be available for every student in India, at least on a non-commercial basis for education; but I think it ought to be available to every industry and every local official, because that’s how we enforce public safety. Everybody knows the law.
[Anuj Srinivas] Correct, correct. Carl, part of your mission, part of the work of many other public domain advocates, is not just that this information needs to be made accessible for free and so on and so forth; but also the quality of access. For instance, you know the documents need to be—You should be able to zoom in, or should be a more aesthetically pleasing format that people could actually use it for research. A little bit of that work extends to your Digital Library of India, and the kind of work that you’ve been putting in over the last two years. Could you elaborate a little about that?
[Carl Malamud] Well, for the standards, we retyped many of them into HTML, including the building code. We redraw the diagrams, recode the formulas. The Digital Library of India, they claimed it was 550,000 books up on a government server. Long term program scanning books all over India.
[Anuj Srinivas] And they is?
[Carl Malamud] The government of India, the government of India. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is the sponsor of this project. I noticed this Digital Library of India, and I looked at it. I saw two things. It wasn’t very accessible, right. It was hard to search. The server kept going down. They kept losing DNS. The server would disappear; so I made a
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