Page:Exploring the Internet.djvu/21

 United Nations treaty status, the ITU had to compete with other groups for the attention of implementors and users.

I sent Tony a note and suggested that since we both agreed that the ITU really had an indeterminate legal basis for asserting copyright, I would simply take all 19,000 pages of the Blue Book, scan it, run it through OCR software, and post it on the Internet for distribution by anonymous FTP, a service that allows a site to give the public access to file archives using the File Transfer Protocol to any user who logs in as "anonymous." (The Blue Book is the massive set of 1988 standards developed by the ITU's Consultative Committee on International Telephone and Telegraph to govern the operation of everything from telephone signalling systems to packet data networks to ISDN to high-speed moderns.)

Now, there are a couple of points worth keeping in mind. Tony was a senior lawyer for a powerful United Nations group that made lots of money selling these documents. While Tony certainly sympathized with my goals, I wasn't quite sure how he was going to react to this form of standards terrorism. Putting a lawyer on notice that you plan to relabel his corporate assets with a $0 price tag is kind of like putting Honda stickers on the motorcycles parked outside a Harley bar.

The other point is that the Blue Book is over 19,000 pages long. Scanners and OCR are great technology, but it would take an awfully long time to carry out such a project on my little home PC. In fact, in a world of finite resources, you might even call my plan an idle threat.

Idle threat or no, this message caught the ITU's attention. One year later, in June of 1991, after endless messages back and forth to Tony, I had received a fax from the Secretary-General asking me to post all ITU standards on the Internet on an "experimental" basis. I promptly booked a plane ticket to Geneva for August to pry the data out of the cold, clammy hands of the bureaucracy. Next thing I knew, I was in Geneva, ready to go to work.