Somewhere in a digitized collection, a set of diagrams from an 1832 Urdu manuscript called the Qanoon-e-Islam sits waiting to be discovered. It illustrates the propitious days and directions for travel — advice from a world that no longer exists, preserved in a form that anyone with a browser can now access. That's not a small thing. That's a kind of miracle.
This week's literary news, read together, tells a story about who gets to hold knowledge — and what happens when those hands open.
Twenty-five years ago, the founders of Creative Commons made what they called a bet. Give creators simple tools to share their work freely, they thought, and maybe — maybe — a million people would use them. Hal Abelson recently recalled laughing at how modest that ambition sounds now. The actual number of works shared under Creative Commons licenses "starts with a B."