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, 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.
The State of Georgia claims that its statutes are a copyrighted work, and that rogue archivist Carl Malamud and public.resource.org committed an act of piracy by making the laws of Georgia free for all to see and copy.
Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, "On Tuesday, January 14, 2014 at 10AM, the House Judiciary Committee will be holding
hearings on the
Scope of Copyright Protection. I will be testifying on the subject of Edicts of
Government, including copyright assertions over state laws and federally-mandated
public safety codes. — Read the rest
Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, "One of the most important public safety laws in Europe is Dir. 2001/95/EC which regulates general product safety. Public.Resource.Org, in our ongoing quest to make legally-mandated public safety codes available, purchased the German instantiation of 40 of these essential codes and made them available on the Internet. — Read the rest
Rogue archivist Carl Malamud's 10 Rules for Radicals is the transcript of his keynote at the 19th World Wide Web Consortium conference in 2010. It's a thrilling and often hilarious account of his adventures in liberating different kids of information and networks from various bureaucracies in his storied and exciting career. — Read the rest
Brian Stelter of the New York Times reports on the International Amateur Scanning League, consisting of volunteers who are copying the 3,000 DVDs at the National Archives and Records Administration. The videos will be uploaded to the net for all to enjoy. — Read the rest
I've just finished reading Carl Malamud's remarkable pamphlet, By the People, the transcript of an address he gave to the Government 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., on September 10, 2009. Carl is the beloved "rogue librarian" who has done so much to liberate tax-funded government works, from movies to court rulings to the text of laws themselves, putting these public domain works on the Internet where they belong. — Read the rest
This is a bit unconventional, but I have launched a front-port campaign to be nominated Public Printer of the United States. I'm inspired by Gus Geigengack, a working printer who convinced FDR to name him to the post.
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.
Carl Malamud sez, "I gave a talk at OSCON about '10 government hacks.' I posted my presentation materials as a series of 10 movies with textual commentary on the Internet Archive. Here's Hack 1."
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
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
Twenty years ago today, Boing Boing became a blog. Mark Frauenfelder's first post linked to Street Tech, a now-dormant gadget blog. Now there are 160,000 more posts just like it and the impossible task of summarizing the best of them in yet another. — Read the rest
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.
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."
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.
For years we have chronicled the tireless fight of rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously) whose Public.Resource.org has devoted itself to publishing the world's laws, for free, where anyone can see and share them.
For years, rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously) has battled for the right to publish the law online in freely readable and shareable formats, through his activist group Public Resource.
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
