"Kahle's goal is universal access to all knowledge" Becky Hogge profiles Brewster Kahle in the October 17 New Stateman. Excerpt: Like other successful net entrepreneurs, Kahle has ploughed his spoils into a non-profit endeavour, and the result is the Internet Archive, an attempt to achieve what the ancient Greeks and Egyptians tried at the library of Alexandria: to make a permanent record of all human knowledge. But this time around the library will be on the internet, universally accessible and - crucially - flameproof....Yes, Kahle's goal is universal access to all knowledge, and so the Internet Archive aims to make every book ever written available over the web. "The ancient library of Alexandria collected 75 per cent of all the books of all the peoples of the world in 300BC. Our opportunity is to do that again, but then to one-up the ancients by making it available universally. It is technologically within our grasp and it could be one of the greatest achievements of humankind." In building this library, Kahle has had to sue his own country. The case, which is awaiting a hearing date, argues that copyright regulations enacted in anticipation of the digital age are contrary to the First Amendment. He explains: "I think it will come as a surprise to most people that the library system of physical books we grew up with has been made risky, if not illegal, in the digital world. This makes no sense. We needed some clarification as to what we as a library were allowed to do with, for example, out-of-print and orphan works, things that are traditionally found on the shelves of libraries. In the US, the way you ask a question like that is you file a lawsuit." By chance, I catch him on the morning he has announced the Open Content Alliance, a partnership between the Internet Archive, the search engine Yahoo! and the University of California to digitise historical works of fiction. The announcement comes nine months after Google launched a similar, huge-scale digitisation project. The two projects differ in the way they propose to offer the digital books once they have scanned them. Whereas Kahle's team would make full-text, searchable copies available to all users of the web, Google will allow access only from the libraries in which the original books are stored, and as extracts through its commercial service Google Print. When I ask Kahle how he feels about Google's project, he takes a deep breath. "We applaud the enthusiasm of Google to make steps in this area and digitise materials. But we would rather see an open system applied for the open content arena, in the same tradition as the open networks that brought us the internet. That fits much better with civic institutions like libraries." ___________________________________________________________ How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com