Brain scan for the Humans

FOR a man who has set himself a seemingly impossible Health mission.  Relaxing in the black leather recliner that serves as his office chair, his stockinged feet wriggling with evident enthusiasm, the founder of the Internet Archive explains what has driven him for more than a decade.

It would be easy to dismiss as an idealistic fruitcake, but for one thing: he has an impressive record when it comes to setting lofty goals and then lining up the people and technology needed to get the job done. “Brewster is a visionary who looks at things differently,” says Carole Moore, chief librarian at the University of Toronto. “He is able to imagine doing things that everyone else thinks are impossible. But then he does them.”

Mr Kahle is an unostentatious millionaire who does not “wear his money on clothes”, as one acquaintance graciously puts it. But behind his dishevelled demeanour is a skilled technologist, an ardent activist and a successful serial entrepreneur. Having founded and sold technology companies to AOL and Amazon, he has now devoted himself to building a non-profit digital archive of free materials—books, films, concerts and so on—to rival the legendary Alexandrian library of antiquity. This has brought him into conflict with Google, the giant internet company which is pursuing a similar goal, but in a rather different (and more commercially oriented) way.

Biblio-tech

After graduating in 1982 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he had studied with Marvin Minsky, an artificial-intelligence guru, Mr Kahle joined a group of MIT alumni who were founding a company, Thinking Machines, that made parallel supercomputers. There Mr Kahle worked alongside such luminaries as Richard Feynman (a Nobel prize-winning American physicist), Dr Minsky and Daniel Hillis, a maverick computer scientist best known as the inventor of the 10,000-year clock.

Building on the search technology developed at Thinking Machines, Mr Kahle left to found his own company, WAIS Inc, in 1989. It took its name from the Wide Area Information Server protocol, an early form of internet search engine which had been developed by Thinking Machines with Apple, Dow Jones and KPMG, and made software for online publishing. Its customers included the Wall Street Journal, which was setting up the first subscription-based online news site, and CMP, a magazine company that pioneered internet advertising. Mr Kahle was a decade ahead of his competitors in grasping the importance of payment systems, online privacy and user ratings. AOL bought the firm in 1995 for an undisclosed sum, thought to be around $15m.

In addition to this archive of web pages there is also an audio library with more than 300,000 MP3 files, a moving-images archive with more than 150,000 films and videos, and a live-music archive with recordings of more than 60,000 concerts. All the collections are available free to anyone with internet access, each gathering its own set of fans. A remarkably popular archive within the audio library is devoted to the Grateful Dead.

It is easy to dismiss Mr Kahle as an idealist, but he has an impressive record of getting things done.

But all these things are steps towards Mr Kahle’s wider goal: to build the world’s largest digital library. He has recruited 135 libraries worldwide to openlibrary.org, the aim of which is to create a catalogue of every book ever published, with links to its full text where available. Some 200 people work for the Internet Archive, which has an annual budget of $10m-14m. Initially funded by Mr Kahle, the archive now gets much of its income from grants made by foundations and from libraries that pay it to digitise their books. It also runs a variety of one-off projects, such as a collaboration with America’s space agency, NASA, to make available photos and films relating to the history of the space programme, and a “print on demand” system to turn digital files into physical books in minutes.

With his happy-go-lucky management style, Mr Kahle comes across as easy-going. But the 48-year-old has been known to stand his ground—even against the tough guys. “Come back when you have a warrant,” reads the floor mat underneath his office recliner. It was a gift from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (an activist group on whose board Mr Kahle sits) after Mr Kahle refused to hand over information about one of the Internet Archive’s users to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2007.

This activist for online privacy is also a staunch supporter of openness. He insisted that the Internet Archive’s specially developed scanning machine, called Scribe, should be an open-source device, meaning that details of how it works are made available to anyone who wants them. The same is true of the “PetaBox”, another archive-developed machine that holds 1m gigabytes of data. “Everything Brewster does is open. He personifies openness,” says John Seely Brown, who sits on Amazon’s board of directors and was previously the chief scientist at Xerox, and the director of its Palo Alto Research Centre. Being open “is the right way to have a thriving industry,” says Mr Kahle. “I have been much more successful when letting people know what I want to do. I get much more help that way.”