The New York Times on Carl Malamud and his tireless battle to make the law free for all to read

For years, we've covered the efforts of rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously) to make the law free for all to read, from liberating paywalled court records from PACER to risking fines and even prison to make standards that have been incorporated into regulation available, to his longrunning fight with the State of Georgia to make the state's annotated legal code public, which may be headed for the Supreme Court.

Steven Levy profiles Carl Malamud, Boing Boing's favorite rogue archivist

Steven Levy, author of Hackers and one of the best tech writers in the field (previously), has profiled Carl Malamud (previously), the prolific, tireless freedom fighter who has risked everything to publish the world's laws on the internet, even those claimed to be owned by "nonprofit" standards organizations whose million-dollar execs say that you should have to pay to read the law.

Carl Malamud, rogue archivist, in Wired

Wired's Ryan Singel's done a great profile on Boing Boing pal Carl Malamud, the rogue archivist who's taking all the public material the government charges money to access and putting it on the web for free.


If you want to search federal court documents, it's not a problem.

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Reinventing TiVo. Carl Malamud wants

Reinventing TiVo. Carl Malamud wants to develop something called NetTopBox, which is basically a cross between TiVo (automatically record shows you're likely to be interested in) and Slashdot (explicitly review and rate otehrs' reviews of programming). Seems silly to me — TiVo's heading in that direction already with their collaborative filter (which is so utterly fantastic, I could swoon, for example, my TiVo nabbed me "Emmet Otter's Jug Band Xmas Special," an old, old, old Jim Henson special, without my having to tell it about it). — Read the rest

Official Code of Georgia Annotated now a Github Repo

Our favorite rogue archivist Carl Malamud says:

I'm writing to you today with good news! We've transformed the Official Code of Georgia Annotated into beautiful HTML and put it on a github repo.

Some of you may remember that the venerable State of Georgia sued my organization, Public Resource, for having posted the laws of Georgia on the Internet (and they even accused me of a "practice of terrorism" in their complaint!). — Read the rest

The Supreme Court just heard the State of Georgia's argument for copyrighting the law and charging for access to it

For years, rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously) has been scanning and posting proprietary elements of the law, such as standard annotations or building and safety codes developed by outside parties and then incorporated into legislation, on the theory that if you are expected to follow the law, you must be able to read, write and share that law.

An Indian research university has assembled 73 million journal articles (without permission) and is offering the archive for unfettered scientific text-mining

The JNU Data Depot is a joint project between rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously), bioinformatician Andrew Lynn, and a research team from New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University: together, they have assembled 73 million journal articles from 1847 to the present day and put them into an airgapped respository that they're offering to noncommercial third parties who want to perform textual analysis on them to "pull out insights without actually reading the text."

Lawyers and law students' signatures needed for Supreme Court amicus brief in favor of publishing the law

Attentive reader will note that rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously) published the laws of Georgia — including the paywalled annotations to the state laws — in 2015, prompting the state to sue him and literally call him a terrorist; Malamud countersued in 2015 and won a huge victory in 2018, when the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that the law could not be copyrighted.

Who may swim in the ocean of knowledge?

I've written an op-ed on The Wire, a prominent nonprofit publication in India about access to knowledge. Access to scientific knowledge has been colonized by a few publishers who have improperly laid claim to the ocean of knowledge. This situation is morally untenable and contrary to law. — Read the rest