TeleRead, however, was hardly antischool, given all the new possibilities it could open up online for teachers and students. Looking back, I just wished that Bracey had seen a note I received from a teacher in Illinois who had asked more than sixty magazines for permission to reprint articles for her small class at no profit. Only twenty-five publications had gone along. “We were ignored sometimes,” the woman had e-mailed me, “and once I was told, by phone, never to use any articles from that publication. That was _Windows Magazine_, and I didn’t renew my subscription.” Of her anthology, she had said: “It’s a better textbook because it’s more up to date.” Clearly we could never separate “educational” uses of the NII from the rest; an article from a commercial magazine could actually prove so much more valuable than an instantly obsolete textbook. TeleRead would make back issues of magazines available for free, make current ones easier to obtain, and, above all, allow free textbooks to be updated instantly, complete with hypertext links to the rest of the national library. But predictably the NII Advisory Council ignored TeleRead and more or less green-lighted the Green Paper. The council for the most part came out in favor of publishers enjoying control over transmission rights. In effect these people were kissing off the idea of a comprehensive, cost-justified library that all Americans could afford to use online, whether for school or for self-improvement. As I was concluding this book, it wasn’t certain that the Green Paper would slither its way into law in more or less the original form. But the news from Capitol Hill didn’t cheer me. The Republican Congress appeared to be at least as skewed in favor of copyright holders as were the Democrats. Even diluted (and renamed the White Paper in the final version), the Green Paper might well be a disgrace. I worried about the rest of the world. Imagine the Australians or Europeans looking to the United States for leadership in Net-related copyright matters. To me, the Green Paper bore the stains of greenbacks. People around D.C. had a polite little word, “access.” It didn’t mean legal violations, but rather purchases of policymakers’ ears. Information magnates had access. I wondered if the little child in Al Gore’s hometown gave so faithfully to major politicians, flew Supreme Court justices to Hawaii, and doled out $15,000 “justice” awards.