Does our current (or any recently passed) government REALLY think its a good idea for ANY portion of our (archived) nations deliberations about what this country should be to be privately owned? … (if so, fuck them).

The copyright systm is a nightmare in it’s current form, and the whole concept of “intellectual property” needs a whole lot of work.

Pardon my rant. Peace

Dan, what’s with the sz?

Er, no it’s not. It’s what makes something convenient.

The public domain is the public domain, whether it’s a crumbling piece of paper in a drawer in Washington, DC, or a PDF we can open in our browser.

The problem that is faced with legislative history is that there is so much of it, it is not recorded in an order that is useful for anyone working with it, and it’s not searchable. West does have a pretty good system for finding information that’s not in any particular order and linking it to other information that might be useful.

Would it be better if the National Archives, the GAO or someone put together its own annotated, indexed, searchable database of federal laws, important cases interpreting them and pertinent legislative history? Yep. I wish they would. But that would be spending tax dollars to benefit lawyers. See how that would fly. Unfortunately it isn’t cheap to do and only a few outfits (West and Lexis predominantly) do it. My theory is that “exclusive” means that the GAO won’t cut the same deal with Lexis.

It may exist but it isn’t public. In this day and age, visibility on the net *is* the definition of what makes something public.

sh…

“Is this the official record of what Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and all those guys did and wrote about? Does it include all the writings of clerks, secretaries and other assistants?”

Um, no, it is not. *All* of the paper records at issue here were created in the 20th century covering the 64th-104th congress.

@5 wrote:

“They’re government documents. They shouldn’t be in any person or organization’s sole control.”

There is nothing in the contract between GAO and Thomson that establishes any exclusivity. The GAO is very explicit that what it is doing is assisting Thomson in digitizing the documents at as minimal cost as possible in exchange for a) preserve the documents in digital format, and b) having electronic search access to the documents. The GAO had a pilot project to scan documents, but apparently found it a bigger project than anticipated (in fact, the contract with Thomson explicitly requires them to re-scan all of the docs the GAO itself had already digitized).

As @6 points out, Thomson’s use of the word “exclusive” in its *marketing* materials almost certainly is a dig at Lexis rather than an attempt to reclaim these documents from the public domain.

It will be interesting to see what their reply is to Public Resource.

It would be interesting to find out what Lexis thinks of this and whether or not they would like the same deal that Thomson got and that Public Resource is asking for. It’s a shame the GAO didn’t put out a notice back in March 2007 when it reached this decision to see if there were nonprofits who might be interested in scanning all of these docs and then making them available to the GAO and the public. That’s the real travesty here, IMO.