Open source intelligence -- not to be confused with Open-source software -- is "a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources (my emphasis) and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence." Libraries in the Federal Depository Library Program have since the early 1940s received output from this process in the form of Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) materials *for free*. FBIS materials offered translation of foreign news sources, and via the Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) foreign language books, newspapers, journals, unclassified foreign documents and research reports. FBIS became the World News Connection in 1996, but it is a severely limited version (about half) of what's available for internal government use.

The Federal of American Scientists has more on FBIS. Check out FBIS and JPRS materials in library collections near you!

All that background as context to a very troublesome turn of events as described by a recent post on the govdoc-l list (see the email below stripped of personal information). This important piece of the govt information universe is now only available via a very expensive commercial database (World News Connection), depriving the academic and larger research communities of full access to all that is done by FBIS at taxpayer expense. Please help us by contacting the Open Source Center (OSCinfo@rccb.osis.gov 202-338-6735, or 1-800-205-8615) and Robert Tapella (PublicPrinter@gpo.gov) at the Government Printing Office and request that the Open Source Center offer free access of opensource.gov to depository libraries. Thanks!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:25:58 -0600
Subject: OpenSource.gov access

Has any library successfully gained access to OpenSource.gov?

For those who are unfamiliar with this resource, here is the what their web page says about them:

"OpenSource.gov provides timely and tailored translations, reporting and analysis on foreign policy and national security issues from the OpenSourceCenter and its partners. Featured are reports and translations from thousands of publications, television and radio stations, and Internet sources around the world. Also among the site's holdings are a foreign video archive and fee-based commercial databases for which OSC has negotiated licenses. OSC's reach extends from hard-to-find local publications and video to some of the most renowned thinkers on national security issues inside and outside the US Government. Accounts are available to US Government employees and contractors. Register today to see what OpenSource.gov has to offer."

When we tried to register, they informed that we would have to justify why we needed access to the information and that we could get the information through World News Connection (via Dialog) OR, and I quote:

"In addition to the World News Connection, individuals may be able to access OSC products through university libraries, or the Federal Depository Library Program. Many Depository Libraries received CDs from the US Government Printing Office that contain select Open Source Center products." [The CDs that they are referring to are the FBIS materials (PREX 7.10/3:)]

In our response, we informed them that WNC was an expensive database they we could not afford and that their information regarding OSC being distributed through the FDLP was sorely out of date since the CDs have NOT been distributed for over 5 years.

In their response, they say they are considering adding additional agencies such as the Federal Depository Library (FDL) as part of the approved list of agencies in OpenSource.gov., but such a review would take a considerable amount of time to do. (I took this to mean, when 'ell freezes over.) Now here is the strange part--they think the FDLP is under the Dept of Interior and we could sign up that way--but our email address would need to have .gov or .mil in it. I am not sure, but I think they are actually referring to the Natural Resource Library in the U.S. Dept of Interior, which is a federal depository library, with which we are not associated, so this is NOT an option.

At this point I am stymied as to how we can have access to information that was formerly available FOR FREE through depository but is now only available through commercial ($$$) means. I know that GPO is aware that the CDs are no longer being distributed because of the creation of the OpenSource database. The only message I could find about this situation via the GOVDOC-L archives was from 2007 when they said "FDLP is still working with the agency OSC to get an agreement with how we are going to access their database." It is now 3 years later and we still do not have access to this information.

In the meantime, we have a professor on campus doing research in Middle East affairs and would like to have access to more recent information than what we have in our library via microfiche and CDs. We can not afford WNC, so I don't know what else we can do--except get access to OpenSource.gov. If anyone has been successful, I would be happy to hear how you did it.

The folks at Communia the European Thematic Network on the digital public domain have laid out a clear, concise, easy to understand Public Domain Manifesto calling for the preservation and strengthening of the public domain and calling on cultural heritage organizations (including libraries!) to ensure that works in the Public Domain are available to all of society. Please read the manifesto and consider signing on.

On a side note, This isn't the first manifesto on the block. Also check out the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge and Columbia Professor of Law Eben Moglen's dotCommunist Manifesto (coming out of the Free Software movement). These three together show that there's a significant number of people around the world who think the public domain is something that's too important to cultures to let go by the wayside.

General Recommendations

1. The term of copyright protection should be reduced.
2. Any change to the scope of copyright protection (including any new definition of protectable subject-matter or expansion of exclusive rights) needs to take into account the effects on the Public Domain.
3. When material is deemed to fall in the structural Public Domain in its country of origin, the material should be recognized as part of the structural Public Domain in all other countries of the world.
4. Any false or misleading attempt to misappropriate Public Domain material must be legally punished.
5. No other intellectual property right must be used to reconstitute exclusivity over Public Domain material.
6. There must be a practical and effective path to make available 'orphan works' and published works that are no longer commercially available (such as out-of-print works) for re-use by society.
7. Cultural heritage institutions should take upon themselves a special role in the effective labeling and preserving of Public Domain works.
8. There must be no legal obstacles that prevent the voluntary sharing of works or the dedication of works to the Public Domain.
9. Personal non-commercial uses of protected works must generally be made possible, for which alternative modes of remuneration for the author must be explored.

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

Carl Malamud's FedFlix project is a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) whereby he takes NTIS videos, digitizes them and uploads them to the Internet Archive.

Well now he's expanding FedFlix to include public domain videos from the National Archives. He's released 41 videos into the public domain in this way, but has put together an Amazon Wish List in order to expand public access to public domain video content from the National Archives. If you see anything you'd like to buy the public domain, they'll take your DVD and upload the video to YouTube, the Internet Archive, and to public.resource.org's own rsync/ftp public domain stock footage library. So why not add a gift of the public domain to your favorite person's/people's stockings this year? We'll all be glad we did!

UPDATE 12/25/09: The wish list has been fulfilled. You can watch all of the donated NARA videos on YouTube, Internet Archive, or public.resource.org's bulk server. Thanks Carl!

[HT BoingBoing!]

January 1, 2010 is Public Domain Day, according to the Open Knowledge Foundation. And on January 1, the works of 563 authors will enter into the public domain! See OKFN's public domain database. You can change the year on the end of the url to see list of public domain works for other years or search/browse by person or work. Pretty cool. Some of the more famous authors whose works will be released to the public domain include Sigmund Freud, Zane Grey, Sidney Howard, Ford Hermann Hueffer (aka Ford Madox Ford), Edward Sapir, Constance Lindsay Skinner, and William Butler Yeats.

[Thanks Open Knowledge Foundation!]

In a "dramatic change of practice," Cornell University Library has decided it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. I congratulate Cornell and hope that other libraries will follow this precedent.

"The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks." The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell's donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell).

"Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles," said Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "It seemed better just to acknowledge their public domain status and make them freely usable for any purpose. And since it doesn't make sense to have different rules for material that is reproduced at the request of patrons, we have removed permission obligations from public domain works."

[HT BoingBoing!]

Access to Old Information, by Steven M. Bellovin, SMBlog, 8 March 2009.

Bellovin notes that Google "requests" you use public domain books you download from books.google.com for "personal, non-commercial purposes." This isn't a new issue, of course, and Bellovin points out that Congressional Information Services, Inc. claims that its microfilms of a U.S. government documents cannot be reused "except for individual research."

He continues:

What we are seeing is the use of contract law to obtain rights not granted by copyright. If we are not careful, we will see public information locked up. Worse yet, digital records can be protected by so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, making them inaccessible except on terms dictated by the physical record's owner.

...We need to ask about the fate of public documents (such as government records) and about the role of libraries.... [I]f a private company is going to be the designated publisher, it should not control how the documents are used.

He also calls on libraries to do their part to keep this from happening, for "By agreeing to stringent restrictions, above and beyond what would be permitted under the Fair Use doctrine of copyright law, [libraries] undermine their own goals.

I would add that, in the digital age, one way we can ensure free access to government information is by making the raw, complete digital information universally freely and accessible. Private sector companies can then add value and put their restrictions on their added value services, not on the content.

We've been following the Obama transition team's change.gov site for a few weeks now and were dismayed that the change.gov site had been copyrighted -- remember, government documents, including Web sites in the .gov domain, are in the public domain according to copyright law.

I was just alerted by a tweet from John Wonderlich, that change.gov has changed their copyright statement to a Creative Commons attribution license -- meaning visitors are 1) free to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work; and 2) to Remix/adapt the work as long as they "attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor." That CC license is "approved for free cultural works."

While I applaud the change to a creative commons license as a step in the right direction, I still believe that change.gov -- and all .gov sites -- need to be explicitly in the public domain (which as you remember is a statutory requirement According to Copyright Law 17 U.S.C. § 105). If site administrators wanted the geek street cred that comes with creative commons, why didn't they choose the creative commons public domain dedication?

This is an open government issue; the public domain is critical to open and transparent government operations. If the Obama administration is serious about ethics and open government, then they will change their copyright statement on change.gov and donate the site's information to the public domain. Is that so much to ask? If you agree, please contact the change.gov administrator(s) and politely but strongly urge them to support the public domain. I just did.

--that is all.

James Boyle, professor at Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain(!), has a new book out called, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. There are many reasons to be excited about this new tome. Not only is it an empassioned and highly readable treatise on why it's important to protect the public domain -- which starts with the humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich (read the preface :-) ) -- but Professor Boyle has put his book out under a creative commons license so you can get a free download in addition to purchasing the book for your library or for your own bookshelves. But best of all, Boyle acknowledges the tireless work of librarians in protecting public access to knowledge (you're welcome, Professor Boyle ;-) ).

The entire community of librarians deserves our thanks for standing up for free public access to knowledge for over two hundred years. Librarians are my heroes. They should be yours, too. -- Acknowledgement p. X

There is a good article in Searcher Magazine that documents specialists and other interested in public domain materials should read:

Title: 'Copyfraud' and Public Domain Works.

Author: Ebbinghouse, Carol

Source: Searcher; Jan2008, Vol. 16 Issue 1, p40-52, 9p

Ms. Ebbinghouse does a good job of explaining how some try to usurp the public domain through fraudulent notices and/or slight alterations of materials. Her opening gives a good flavor of what's to come:

You find a PDF version of the Federalist Papers on the internet that is just what you need, but it carries a copyright date of 2001. Now that's odd, considering that the last Federalist paper was written and published in 1788. Cautious, you find an ASCII text version, but it has a copyright date of 1999. Can you download this one? Does the fact that one is an image and the other plain text make any difference? And how the heck does anything written in the 18th century end up with post-1923 copyright dates?

Can someone legitimately move public domain text into copyright? What about when you go to an archive, only to find open source and nonpublic domain titles mixed in with public domain items, but the archive seems to put restrictions on your subsequent use of everything (no copying without permission; no commercial re-use, etc.)?

What leads some vendors to attempt to convince people that public domain materials are really under copyright? In part, because there's little legal cost to doing so, According to Ms. Ebbinghouse:

As Jason Mazzone points out, "Copyright law suffers from a basic defect: The law's strong protections for copyrights are not balanced by explicit protections for the public domain. Accordingly, copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The limited penalties for copyfraud under the Copyright Act, coupled with weak enforcement … give publishers an incentive to claim ownership, however spurious, in everything. Although falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act [17 U.S.C. §506(c)] prosecutions are extremely rare. Moreover, the Copyright Act provides no civil penalty for claiming copyrights in public domain materials. … [and] no federal agency is specially charged with safeguarding the public domain."

Reading this paragraph gives rise to an interesting idea. What if there were substantial fines for removing works from the public domain and the fines were used to run an orphan copyright registry that people could use without fear of prosecution. What if the American Library Association could get together with large foundations and start suing corporations for violations of the public domain? Would it lead to a world where if you weren't certain of a work's, you presumed it was public domain for fear of the consequences of an illegal claim of copyright? We could live with that.

Waking up from that daydream, I want edto point out this articles to readers of FGI because so much government information is both public domain and often repackaged as being in copyright. And occaisionally like the first edition of the Iraq Study Group report, government documents have copyrighted materials embeded into them. Ms. Ebbinghouse's article can help you navigate these difficult issues and help you deal with the copyfrauds out there.

This is my first post of 2008 and I wanted to wish everyone a happy public domain day! Yes that's right, besides being a day of football, resolutions, hangovers, Korean Duk-Gook (tastes just as good with veggie broth!), it's the day when the works of authors who died in 1957 (for life +50 copyright countries) or those that died in 1937 (in the life+70 countries)  -- see this article for a list of countries and their copyright lengths -- go into the public domain for our collective ownership and use.

To ring in the day, John Mark Ockerbloom, Everybody's Librarian, has donated the copyrights of his 1993 Web sites to the public domain in honor of the 14 year initial term of copyright specified in the Statute of Anne and the US's first copyright law. And Wallace McLean over at CopyrightWatch.ca has a nice list of authors whose works are rolling into the public domain.

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

Day 8&9: We left Red Bluff yesterday and we are now in Arcata gearing up for tomorrow's stop at the Humboldt County Library in Eureka, CA.

Our time in Red Bluff reminded us the resemblance between our physical and our knowledge landscape. Red Bluff is a town of 10,000+ people but houses and businesses are so spread out that everyone drives their car (actually it was mostly trucks and SUVs which probably accounts at least in part for the poor air quality) which creates a feeling of disconnect from the community. We didn't see any active public places (parks, squares etc) where community members were getting together and sharing their space in common.We are witnessing the shrinking of public spaces where culture and community emerge. This is mirrored in the erosion of the public domain. As knowledge/information has become more and more hyper-commodified, the idea of public ownership of culture drifts into the fog of history. This bookmobile has been a great opportunity to remind ourselves and those we talk to about the importance of the public domain in the creation of culture and community.

In reaching the crest of our journey, we will have a busy few days coming up including being part of Oysters and Ale festival, a WiFi fundraiser for Humboldt County Library at the Eureka Marina on Friday. We've been ready for all kinds of technical difficulties and have backup plans for all contingencies *except* for our wheels. And wouldn't you know it, we've run into a blocked radiator in the bookmobile. No way around it but to get it in the shop for repair now! So far the bookmobile has been good to us so we are very hopeful. We will keep you posted.

Julia Tryon, Government Documents Librarian of the Phillips Memorial Library at Providence College posted some interesting information about the intersection of Federal Publications and Google Books to govdoc-l this week. She is quoted here with permisssion:

My director has asked me to discover what I may about the amount of documents available in Google's digital projects.  I've been looking at Google, partners' websites, articles, blogs, etc.  I have found a lot of chit-chat but very little substantive information.  Maybe I am just not looking for it the right way or in the right places.

It seems that there is a blackout on reporting statistics for these projects.  Google and most of the partners give no statistical data at all.  Stanford did have a page with statistics that was buried on their project's website but the information had not been updated since 2004.  

To figure out the statistics on my own, I have tried searching Google Books, Stanford, and University of Michigan; but there is no way to limit a search to government documents.  On Google I was able to search by publisher and, using various abbreviations for GPO that are used in
the publisher field, I came up with 187,522 (GPO-141,600; Gov't-2322; Government Printing Office-43,600).  The university catalogs did not allow me to search by publisher.

When looking at the search results in Google for publisher field has GPO, I found 141,600 items, only 82,487 of which were available in the full view.  And although it is nice to think that we have the full text for 82,487 documents, not all of them can be used.  I randomly picked a title to see how it looked and chose the Statistical Abstract for 1954. The pages were clear enough to read easily but on every even numbered page part of the right hand column was chopped off.

Have you done your own study/poking around/etc with Google Books and Federal Documents? Share your findings with us!

Assessing Publicly Available Data
From RAND website:

How much data regarding U.S. anti- and counterterrorism systems, countermeasures, and defenses is publicly available and how easily could it be found by individuals seeking to harm U.S. domestic interests? The authors developed a framework to guide assessments of the availability of such information for planning attacks on the U.S. air, rail, and sea transportation infrastructure, and applied the framework in an information-gathering exercise that used several attack scenarios. Overall, the framework was useful for assessing what kind of information would be easy or hard for potential attackers to find. For each of the attack scenarios, a team of “attackers” was unable to locate some of the information that a terrorist planner would need to gauge the likely success of a potential attack. The authors recommend that procedures for securing sensitive information be evaluated regularly and that information that can be obtained from easily accessible, off-site public information sources be included in vulnerability assessments.

I have a bunch of tabs open of boingboing posts that I want to share, but it's been such a hectic day (I invited Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate party to give a talk today at my library!) so I think I'll just list them and let you all sort them out.

• Peer to Patent: keeping the Patent Office honest with community review
• Amazon will distribute the US National Archive on DVD
• NY Public Library giving away free public domain books-on-demand
• Pirate Party founder at Stanford (I'll post the video soon. W00t!)
• Bruce Schneier interviews TSA head Kip Hawley
• Data mining prompted fight over NSA domestic spying program (here's a login-free link to the NYT article)

Now if THIS doesn't convince you that a) blogs are incredibly useful tools for disseminating information and b) boingboing should be read several times a day as a matter of course then I don't know what will convince you. Happy reading :-)

Thought you had a handle on the concept of copyright? Think again! Last week there was a post on Slashdot entitled, "Should Copyright Be Abolished?" by Greg Bulmash (full article posted on his blog, "Brainhandles"). I think this discussion has relevance to government documents and libraries in general, since we are steadily moving away from a copyright information world and into a licensing information world. I'm trying to get my head around this shift and so welcome the reading material. The ideas of attribution, distribution, DRM, fair use, licensing, public domain... all feature prominently in this discussion.

Bulmash waded into the copyright debate, taking on those in the tech community that seek to abolish copyright. The gist of Bulmash's argument was that "you can't oppose copyright and support open source." Bulmash opines that the GNU Public License, the license under which much open-source software is distributed (there are several flavors of open source licenses, but I won't get into that here), depends on copyright to be enforceable. Therefore, you can't have the GPL without copyright. Bulmash argues for reforming copyright, not abolishing it -- "surgery, not euthanasia."

These members of the anti-copyright crowd cite the GPL (GNU Public License) as an alternative to copyright without any sense of the ironic fact that the GPL can't exist without copyright. They're proposing a solution while simultaneously advocating the destruction of the thing that makes their solution workable. While the GPL is less restrictive than other licensing methods, it's a license and it does impose some restrictions on or conditions for use of the work. It is a method of controlling your work. But without copyright, the GPL could not be enforced.

Bulmash was answered the next day by Karl Fogel of Question Copyright in his essay, "Supporting Open Source While Opposing Copyright." Fogel makes a very compelling argument that the abolition of copyright doesn't necessarily go against the spirit of the GPL, nor does the GPL need to rely on copyright in order to forward the cause of open source or free software (two different, but conflated ideas!). He suggested that Bulmash, "mixes up two completely different concepts: the right to be credited for a work, and the right to control distribution of that work." Fogel goes on to state that copyright is simply the current enforcement tool du jour, but is not a natural and uncontroversial "right."

The basic argument of copyright abolitionists is that people should be free to share when sharing does not result in any diminution of supply. The GPL simply uses copyright law in a jiujitsu-like manner to enforce this principle, in a legal environment where sharing is prohibited by default and must be explicitly permitted to be legal. All the GPL does is create a space where permission to share is enforced. Take his exercise in imagination all the way: imagine if we had laws that did away with most prohibitions against sharing, but that enforced crediting and permitted authors to enforce GPL-like provisions requiring sharing.

and...

Put bluntly: a future law that merely allows authors to enforce sharing need have little in common with today's laws that allow the restriction of sharing. Since these two things are more opposite than alike, calling them both "copyright" doesn't make much sense. But that is what Bulmash does, when he implies that the current copyright regime (or something structurally similar to it) is the only way the GPL could be enforced.

There are some great comments in both threads so if you have the time, brew a pot of tea, sit down and wade through them. You'll be glad you did because this debate definitely has import to what librarians do!