Carl Malamud says:

Public.Resource.Org has published 701 technical standards for the Republic of India. These government-produced documents cover everything cover a vast array of topics important to the people of India, including fascinating topics such as specifications for spices and condiments (tamarind pulp, cloves, fenugreek, curry powder).

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

One of the big issues we face in trying to make legal documents available to citizens at no charge is a feeling in Washington that "ordinary" people just aren't smart enough to read things like public safety codes.

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

On March 15,
Boing Boing kindly allowed me to use this
august forum to serve notice on 7 government officials and 10 of the CEOs of the $1-billion/year industry of
standards people. The issue was privately-developed public safety standards that were incorporated into U.S.

Carl Malamud sez, "Paul Vixie tells a real-life action adventure about the DNS Changer and Conficker plagues that are still active on the Internet and how he ended up running a center for disease control in addition to his day job. — Read the rest

[Editor's note: This morning, I found a an enormous, 30Lb box waiting for me at my post-office box. Affixed to it was a sticker warning me that by accepting this box into my possession, I was making myself liable for nearly $11 million in damages. — Read the rest

An unsigned rap group called After the Smoke couldn't post their song "One in a Million" to YouTube because every time they tried, it generated a YouTube content-match error saying that Universal Music owned their song. It turned out that UMG had laid claim to a leaked video that had a UMG artist performing the unsigned band's track in it, and this effectively gave Universal the power to censor the unsigned band's song. — Read the rest

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Cory Doctorow wrote in the Guardian about our copyright problems on YouTube with FedFlix, a channel of U.S. government videos.

On January 4, we protested one of the ContentID matches on a 1974 film called Pathfinder, which was paid for and produced by the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, "John Podesta and I have written an open letter to President Obama calling for the creation of a Federal Scanning Commission, tasking this body with developing a strategy for digitizing .gov. Today, we do not scan at scale and there is a huge untapped storehouse buried in federal institutions such as the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, National Archives, and scores of others. — Read the rest

My latest Guardian column, "The pirates of YouTube," documents how multinational copyright-holding companies have laid false claim to public domain videos on YouTube — videos posted by the nonprofit FedFlix organization, which liberates public domain government-produced videos and makes them available to the world. — Read the rest

When science fiction writer Bruce McAllister was 16, in 1963, he decided that his English teacher's insistence on seeking out symbolism in literature was a tedious exercise. McAllister, who had just sold his first story, was skeptical of the whole idea of symbolism in literature, so he typed out an ungrammatical, mimeographed questionnaire about symbolism in literature and mailed it to 150 authors. — Read the rest

Two coinages from my Twitter feed this morning:

Infovegan: One who refuses cookies* (@cjoh via @carlmalamud — see infovegan.org for more)

Cookie Monster: One who accepts cookies (JMike2)

*Update: More formally, "Someone who makes a deliberate decision to remove a vast amount of news and information sources from one's diet, sticking to a well constrained allowable set of consumption inputs for their own health's sake." — Read the rest

Timothy Lee has conducted an initial study of improper redaction in PACER, the US court records system. Sensitive information like social security numbers are redacted in these records, but sometimes the redaction is accomplished by drawing a black box over the text in the PDF; the text is still present in the PDF file, it's just not displayed, and it's easy to recover. — Read the rest

John Taylor Williams (who, incidentally, is a talented sound engineer and masters my podcasts) and Thomas "CommandLine" Gideon both volunteer for Carl Malamud's Amateur Scanning League (a project to rescue America's public domain government-funded videos and put them on the web). — Read the rest

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Public.Resource.Org is pleased to announce that the public safety codes of California are now open source. This was accomplished by purchasing (for $1100!!) the fire, electrical, plumbing, building, residential, mechanical and other public safety codes, scanning the paper, re-typing all text twice to ensure accuracy ("double-keying"), converting to HTML during the double-key process, and the programmatic and manual manipulation of the HTML to add additional markup.

17 years ago, Internet radio pioneer (and future rogue archivist) Carl Malamud and search engine inventor (and future Internet Archive founder) Brewster Kahle appeared on an historic segment of NPR's Science Friday to talk with Ira Flatow about the amazing future of the Internet. — Read the rest

Here's rogue archivist Carl Malamud's five-minute Ignite Sebastapol talk on "Code City": the democratic necessity of making all of the nation's laws and codes free to read, download and analyze: "The laws that most directly touch our daily lives are not supreme court opinions or bills of landmark legislation, they are the public safety codes: building, electrical, plumbing, and other technical standards. — Read the rest

Here's another barn-burner of a speech by rogue archivist Carl Malamud, addressing the Gov 2.0 Summit 2010. Carl sez, "Washington, D.C. has become a vast wasteland of computer contracts. The U.S. government spent $81.9 billion in 2010 on information technology and much of that money is misspent, crippling the ability of government to do the jobs with which it has been entrusted. — Read the rest

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

We're setting off some pretty fireworks next week in Washington, D.C. and I wanted to invite people to come watch. Since January, Public.Resource.Org has been organizing Law.Gov workshops all around the country with the help of a stellar cast of co-convenors.

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Boing Boing readers may be familiar with the FedFlix program, where Public.Resource.Org obtains government video and makes it available on YouTube, the Internet Archive, and our own Public Domain Stock Footage Library.

We took a big step forward today with the birth of a new club in Washington, the International Amateur Scanning League.

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

If you've already made your Christmas gifts to EFF and Creative Commons and have a couple of bucks left over? How about buying a gift for the public domain!!

Public.Resource.Org just ordered another 41 titles and spent $560 on some really great FedFlix from the vaults of the National Archive, there is still plenty of great material out there, so we put together an Amazon Wish List.