Time To Make Carl Malamud Head Of The Government Printing Office

from the yes-we-scan dept

If you're unfamiliar with Carl Malamud, you haven't been reading much news lately. He and his work to open up government documents and information to the public have been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post and various other publications in just the last month alone. But that's not to suggest what he's doing is recent. For years, Malamud has gone above and beyond in making government information more accessible and more useful to everyone -- rather than just politicians and big companies.

Now, he's positioning himself to be put in charge of the Government Printing Office to be able to do the same thing from the inside of our federal government, rather than from the outside. It's hard to think of anyone quite as visionary in terms of how government information can be presented to the public in a transparent and useful manner. He's looking for support for his campaign, and you can read all about what he would do if given the chance at YesWeScan.org:

For over 20 years, I have been publishing government information on the Internet. In 2008, Public.Resource.Org published over 32.4 million pages of primary legal materials, as well as thousands of hours of video and thousands of photographs. In the 1990s, I fought to place the databases of the United States on the Internet. In the 1980s, I fought to make the standards that govern our global Internet open standards available to all. Should I be honored to be nominated and confirmed, I would continue to work to preserve and extend our public domain, and would place special attention to our relationship with our customers, especially the United States Congress.

Access to information is a human right and the United States of America is the world's leading producer of information. As the publisher of the United States, GPO plays a vital role in promoting useful knowledge, promoting the progress of science and useful arts, and promoting and preserving the public domain.

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California: We Charge People To Read Our Laws For The Benefit Of Californians

from the sign-of-the-times dept

Back in April, we wrote about how the state of Oregon was threatening Carl Malamud, an activist who has been working hard for years to get public content more widely available to people online, for daring to publish Oregon's laws online. The state claimed copyright, not over the laws, but over the presentation of the laws, which Malamud had scanned. After the public outcry over this, Oregon backed down, and Malamud has continued his efforts. A bunch of folks have been submitting this Santa Rosa Press Democrat story all about Malamud's efforts, with a specific focus on California -- which similarly claims copyright on the presentation of its laws and standards.

California's defense of trying to limit such a display of the laws seems pretty ridiculous:

"We exercise our copyright to benefit the people of California," said Linda Brown, deputy director of the Office of Administrative Law, which manages the state's laws. "We are obtaining compensation for the people of California."

In other words, we hide the laws you have to obey from you in order to get more money into the state's coffers. That hardly seems like a reasonable rationale for the efforts. Hell, based on that rationale, wouldn't it make sense not to post any speed limit signs? After all, all the speeding tickets from ignorant drivers would help "obtain compensation for the people of California." Besides, as we all should know, the purpose of copyright isn't to "obtain compensation for the people of California" but to encourage the creation of new works. Is copyrighting the presentation of laws helping to create new... laws? That doesn't seem right.

In the meantime, Malamud is just going to keep posting the laws and making them easier than ever for people to actually know what laws they're probably breaking all the time. It sounds as though he's hoping someone will actually take him to court over this, as he's confident that a court would rule in his favor, finally setting an important precedent. Here's hoping that's true. Unfortunately, we've seen too many bad legal rulings on similar issues to feel that comfortable with simply letting a court set the precedent.

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