The Free Public Library
Your local library
Books to read, music to listen to, movies to watch. All for free.
A place where you're not limited to consuming only as much culture as you can afford.
This website
No books to read, no music to listen to, no movies to watch. We cannot provide them for you here because it would be copyright infringement.
The Internet is a place where you're limited to consuming only as much culture as you can afford.
Copyright law is broken
We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own, not to force people to pay a toll every time they read a book, listen to music, or watch a movie.
We created free public libraries so that people could consume as much culture as they want for free.
File sharing sites on the Internet serve exactly the same purpose to society as free public libraries. They allow people to consume as much culture as they want for free.
But because file sharing is illegal, the world's biggest and best free public digital libraries are tucked away in dark corners of the Internet, filled with shady advertising and a vague sense of shamefulness.
Meanwhile, the website actually named publiclibrary.org merely represents some random local library in Kentucky. No shady advertising, but just as shameful. A site named something like "publiclibrary.org" should serve a global constituency, not just some random county in Kentucky.
It doesn't have to be this way
We can bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement.
Commercial copyright infringement should remain illegal. Nobody should have the right to profit from your work but you.
But if we legalize noncommercial file sharing, this website or one like it could easily become the most comprehensive free public library in the world.
It could be a place with books to read, music to listen to, and movies to watch. All for free.
A place where you're not limited to consuming only as much culture as you can afford.