Cory Doctorow
TRAITORS
TO HISTORY
A COPYRIGHT-CONTROLLED MUSEUM IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANKIND.
THIS PAST AUGUST, MY PARENTS CAME to visit me in London, and we had a grand sightseeing day that culminated in a visit to the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where clever makers in the 17th and 18th centuries made homebrew instruments to measure their physical environments, sensor arrays so clever that they enabled sailors anywhere in the world to divine their longitude. This was the scientific and military problem of the day, because sailors who can’t calculate their longitude can’t reliably cross oceans.
Today, the Greenwich Observatory is given over to a brilliant museum that tracks the history of this paleo-maker initiative. There are the most cunning ...
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