As a documents librarian, it's always been a particular frustration to me that I could give access to the CA Codes to all who asked *except* for Title 24, the CA Building Standards Codes which are under copyright by and must be purchased from various organizations -- for @ $890!

Well, no more. Carl Malamud and his public domain avengers have just liberated Title 24 (download the whole kit and caboodle here!). This is truly a great birthday present on Independence Day!!

As noted here before, Oregon has been going through a challenge to its copyrighted statutes. The battle appears to be over now and the the statutes are free! mmmm... we love free government information!

On June 19th the Legislative Counsel held a hearing with activist Carl Malamud from Public.Resource.org and others to discuss the issue.... In the end the Legislative Counsel voted to not assert copyright over the Oregon Revised Statutes.

This is a great victory for openness and democracy.

A few weeks ago, we posted a story about GAO selling exclusive access to GAO legislative histories to Thomson West (see "GAO *did* sell exclusive access to legislative history to Thomson West" and GAO subject for all GAO stories). This was a rich historical chunk of GAO information (20,597 legislative histories of most public laws from 1915-1995!!) and it was set to be locked up with T/W claiming exclusive rights and licensing access.

Well, not so fast. Carl Malamud, tireless hero of the public domain, got wind of the deal, and got the GAO to release 10 DVDs of legislative histories, containing 619,481 PDF files -- the pilot project scans they conducted. He has proposed a joint venture with the Internet Archive to scan the same materials with the same terms as Thomson West, give GAO one full copy of all their data AND put up the data online (presumably the Internet Archive) clearly marked as public domain material available for reuse without restriction. And what's more, Carl says, "If they say yes, we intend to ask Congress to earmark funds to pay the Internet Archive to scan this invaluable resource." !!

You can follow the paper trail on Carl's Federal Legislative History site. Below is the letter of unsolicited joint venture sent to GAO. Way to go Carl!!

Carl Malamud’s Oregon page is now updated with the testimony from last week’s hearing:

http://public.resource.org/oregon.gov/

From Tim Stanley's Justia blog:

"Oregon's Legislative Counsel Committee had a meeting this morning to discuss the copyright claim on the Oregon Revised Statutes. After taking legal counsel from Dexter Johnson, talking with Karl Olson, Carl Malamud, three Oregon citizens and myself, they unanimously voted to not to enforce any copyright claims on the Oregon Revised Statutes. This great!!!"

And, I just read this on BoingBoing:

[Posted by Cory Doctorow]

"Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

"Justia and Public.Resource.Org were invited, along with Karl Olson our counsel, to testify before the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee. We were joined by a public panel of wikipedians and open source advocates."

"The process was incredibly well organized. There was a comprehensive briefing packet prepared for the committee, the members asked lots of intelligent questions, and then Dexter Johnson the Legislative Counsel recommended to the committee that they waive assertion of copyright on their statutes. The Majority Leader placed the motion, the President of the Senate called the vote, and the vote was unanimous. This was democracy in action and was great to watch."

[cross posted on Legal Research Plus]

For those of you following the question regarding the copyright of Oregon's Revised Statutes, you might want to visit: public.resource.org/oregon.

The State of Oregon has scheduled a hearing for June 19, 2008 to “consider its copyright policy in light of technological developments and the Internet.”

And, the Public.Resource site now has links to the testimony submitted by Carl Malamud, Tim Stanley and Karl Olson.

Also, if you want to listen to the hearing on Thursday, June 19th, there is a Real Video feed available .

[cross posted on legalresearchplus]

We are pleased to announce the AALL Hot Topic for the annual meeting in Portland, Oregon will be Push Back and Push Forward – Open Access in Oregon and Beyond. So mark your calendars: Sunday, July 13th at 4:15pm.

The program will feature Carl Malamud (public.resource.org) and Tim Stanley (Justia.com).

Recently, the State of Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee sent Justia a notice of copyright infringement and demand to cease and desist online publication of the Revised Statutes online. Carl Malamud and Tim Stanley will share the story of this struggle to keep the laws of Oregon freely available.

But what about the rest of the country? Can state governments prohibit others from downloading, reproducing or distributing their laws? Can courts provide similar restrictions by the nature of their vendor dealings (they do in California!)? Carl Malamud and Tim Stanley will address these questions, too, sharing their concerns and experiences in this area.

This session will provide both an update on a timely issue, and serve as a call to action on how each of us can get involved in the open access movement.

And, on the topic of Oregon, Peter Forsyth has an interesting post on the WikiProject Oregon site. I pasted it below for further reading and perhaps an inspiration for getting involved.

From WikiProject Oregon, posted by Peter Forsyth:

This Thursday, the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee (LCC) will be holding a hearing that should be of major interest to anyone with an interest in Oregon law, and in building (or using) public resources on the Internet. The topic: whether or not the laws that we, the people of Oregon write are in the public domain, or whether the State can prevent their republication by insisting on licensing arrangements.

A couple months back, the LCC — which provides legal advice to the state legislature, and edits draft legislation — issued a takedown notice to justia.com, which was hosting the Oregon Revised Statutes. Justia is a web site that publishes state laws (free of charge, and without advertising) from all states, in a standard format.

Legislative Counsel Dexter Johnson issued the takedown notice under direction from the LCC, and cited a 1953 law that gives it authority to make determinations about ownership of various works of the Legislature. He wrote that although the words of the laws themselves are in the public domain, some of the text involved in their publication — the section numbers, descriptive text, etc. — is owned by the State, and protected by copyright.

California-based nonprofit public.resource.org has been the leading advocate for getting this policy changed. They have retained counsel to challenge the policy. Their research indicates both that there aren’t solid legal grounds for this policy, and that it is contrary to the public interest.

The LCC has invited Public.resource.org to give testimony at their next public meeting, but there is no formal representation for Oregon’s community of wiki editors, bloggers, etc.

I expect to testify at the hearing, and would welcome the company of any other Oregon folks. Let me know if you want to come! Additionally, I’d encourage you all to write your legislators (find out who they are here), and the members of the LCC. I’ll try to work up a standard letter in the next day or two, so you don’t have to compose from scratch; watch this post for further news.

[cross posted on LegalResearchPlus]


The good folks at public.resource.org have just released a new collection on their site: Justice.gov. This collection, once known as FLITE and then later as JURIS, is a digital collection of federal case law. The story behind this is quite fascinating, too.

From the Public.Resource.org site:

"Back when disco was king, the USAF decided that those new-fangled computers might be just the thing for the JAG Corps, so they set a bunch of flyboys down in front of keypunch machines and made a database of U.S. law called FLITE. After several turf-grabbing campaigns and a massive meeting of BOGSATT, the system was taken over by the Department of Justice and re-dubbed JURIS."


"But, the lawyers in Justice were jealous of their pin-stripe buddies in private practice, so they got themselves high-priced West and Lexis-Nexis accounts so that they could be professional. Then, they deleted the JURIS database from government computers so there would be no going back. Today, the U.S. government does not possess a digital copy of the cases and codes that make up the law of the land."

"One copy of JURIS survives, acquired by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) of the University of Pennsylvania and available under a carefully restricted license agreement to those who pay the sum of $800 and agree not to redistribute the data. The LDC is a group of linguistic researchers and they acquire corpora of linguistic interest to analyze. By prohibiting redistribution and binding their members to such constraints, they are able to acquire commercial databases to analyze."


"Public.Resource.Org has purchased a copy of the JURIS database and we have requested that the Linguistic Data Consortium free this public domain data so that it may be examined by all. The database consists of 1,665 files totaling 3.1 gbytes. The 522 mega-words in the corpus yields approximately 2,091,628 pages of text."


"UPDATE: Friday, 13 June 2008. We have made the JURIS database available so that you may judge for yourself the importance of these files. You may browse the directory or download the 900 Mbyte tarball. There is a compelling public policy issue in the fact that the Department of Justice deleted 2 million pages of case law after establishing their for-pay contract with a commercial concern. Why did the government delete such a valuable asset that was created at taxpayer expense? Why would a copy not be kept just in case? Why does the government not have a digital copy of their own work product? These are questions of national concern and the public has a right to examine the evidence."

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org -- along with folks from several other great orgs -- is organizing a non-conference in Chicago this August. He's looking for 100 delegates to meet and work on issues of making government information more accessible to more people in a variety of formats. Find out more information here.

Are there any FGI readers out there interested in going? So far, there are 3 working groups (case law, municipal govts, and copyright) but I'd love to put together a library working group. Any takers? Leave a note in the comments to let us know you're interested in going. In your comments, it'd also be good if you left your ideas about what tasks a library working group could handle. Think of this as pre-un-conference agenda setting :-)

The Internet has created a new generation of individuals and institutes that practice the time-honored tradition of observing and reporting on the activities of government. These are reporters in the sense of court reporters, not journalists, auditors as in independent investigators rather than CPAs.

The classic independent observer is the court reporter, such as Henry Wheaton and Richard Peters, two businessmen in the early days of the Republic who took it upon themselves to collect, print, and sell the decisions of courts. Indeed, it was a business spat between those two that led to the classic pronouncement by the Supreme Court on works of government:

The Court is unanimously of opinion that no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions, and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right. Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834)

The new breed of government observers span all walks of life. In addition to a vibrant commercial sector, there are increasingly a number of nonprofit, academic, and individual citizen efforts."

Here at Stanford, the campus recently enjoyed the excitement that is Recyclemania. (Stanford actually won the Gorilla Prize!)

In the spirit of Recyclemania, I want to share an amazing project for recycling PACER documents. The site, brought to you by Carl Malamud and the good people at Public Resource, gives everyone a chance to liberate PACER case downloads.

How do you do it? Here are the simple instructions from the site:

"Just upload all your PACER Documents to our recycling bin. Click on the recycle bin and you'll be presented with a dialogue to choose files to upload. Then, just hit the “Start Upload” button and you'll hear the sounds of progress as your documents get reinjected into the public domain.

We'll take the documents, look at them, and then put them onto bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/pacer for future distribution. This is a manual process and you won't see your documents show up right away. But, over time, we hope to accumulate a significant database of PACER Documents. "

Interested in helping, but you don't have the time to recycle documents onto the site? Well, lucky for you, the site also allows you contribute with Digital Offsets. The digital offsets are a tax-deductible donation to Public.Resource.Org which will then be utilized to purchase PACER Documents for the site.

Are you lucky enough to live near one of the 16 libraries with FREE access to PACER? Perhaps, you want to sign up to join the Thumb Drive Corps, who will go to these locations with a jump drive and download as many PACER documents as possible for the Pacer recycling site.

So, what is good for the bottle, is good for the docket....

-Erika

Interviews with Innovators: Online Access to Public Information: Carl Malamud, IT Conversations, March 18, 2008.

For many years Carl Malamud has been a tireless crusader for online access to U.S. public information: SEC filings, patents, Congressional video, the Smithsonian's historical photgraphy, and most recently, case law. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Malamud about his strategies, accomplishments, and future plans.

This is an inspiring interview. If only there were libraries and library directors who had the simple, effective vision that Carl has!!

Creative Commons has announced that in partnership with Public.Resource.Org and with legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it has purchased and has now made available at no charge the equivalent of nearly two million pages of legal documents. If printed and piled on top of each other, the documents would make a stack of books 348 feet tall. Included are all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on.
"Though these texts have always technically been in the public domain, the organizations had to purchase the electronic version from a private company that had compiled it. Now available at  this link, they have also been converted to XHMTL so that anyone can develop user interfaces and search engines against the information."

Carl Malamud says his motivation is to make the workings of the government more accessible at no cost and that "This is society's operating system."

• Documents of Library in Boston to Go on Web. By John Markoff, New York Times (December 27, 2007).

A digital library partnership, including two nonprofit organizations and the Boston Public Library, is preparing to begin making digital copies of the library's paper-based government documents collection, which will then be made available on the Internet.

The project, which will take two years and require the hand scanning of millions of pages of government hearings and related publications, will cost an estimated $6 million, according to the project's sponsors.

Boston Public Library librarians said they planned to begin by digitizing the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings from the 1950s, which is regularly sought after by its patrons.

The project is being undertaken by Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit group seeking to open public access to government records, and the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library.

The project is the brainchild of founders of the two organizations, Carl Malamud and Brewster Kahle...

Carl Malamud of Public.resource.org has just made yet another startling announcement that should be a boon for legal scholars, information junkies and advocates of free and openly accessible government information. Starting in early 2008, because of the deal the Malamud and his law ninjas at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have struck with Fastcase, Inc., a large swath of federal case law and Supreme Court decisions will be released into the public domain under a Creative Commons license. As the news release states, the 1.8 million pages of law will be integrated into the ongoing public services from organizations such as Columbia University AltLaw a joint project of Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology, and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School) and Cornell School of Law's Legal Information Institute

Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. announced today that they will release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose.

“The U.S. judiciary has allowed their entire work product to be locked up behind a cash register,” said Carl Malamud, CEO of Public.Resource.Org. “Law is the operating system of our society and today's agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable.”

Fastcase, the leading developer of next-generation American legal research, has agreed to provide Public.Resource.Org with 1.8 million pages of federal case law. This is a marked departure for the online legal research industry, which traditionally has charged expensive subscription fees to access this information.

And what's even cooler is that they're going to wikify it!!

Public.Resource.Org intends to perform an initial transformation on the federal case law archive obtained from Fastcase using open source “star” mapping software, which will allow the insertion of markers that will approximate page breaks based on user-furnished parameters such as page size, margins, and fonts. “Wiki” technology will be used to allow the public to move around these “star” markers, as well as add summaries, classifications, keywords, alternate numbering systems for citation purposes, and ratings or “diggs” on opinions.

Public Domain superhero Carl Malamud has done it again! Public.resource.org has announced a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) (mmmm NTIS documents!!) to digitize their videotapes and deposit them in the Internet Archive. Carl's announcement doesn't say what kind of videotapes NTIS is offering up, but I'm assuming they're coming from NTIS' National Audiovisual Center (NAC) which "contains over 9,000 audiovisual and media productions ... in occupational safety and health, fire services, law enforcement, and foreign languages. Information and educational materials include areas such as history, health, agriculture, and natural resources." I hope Carl can confirm that. And I also hope he'll send us titles/links every month so we can get them into library catalogs and into library users' hands.

And I'd like to challenge libraries to catalog anything of interest to your local users that you find in the Archive -- audio, video, text. If Carl can digitize 20 videotapes a month, imagine how many digital items the 60,000 libraries in 112 countries in the OCLC cooperative can catalog. In no time, libraries could catalog the roughly 600,000 items in the Internet Archive (206,890 audio, 104,076 video, 290,269 text). If each OCLC library catalogs 1 item/day, the job will be done in 100 days. So get to it, and thanks again Carl Malamud for being such an inspiration!

"Public.Resource.Org is pleased to announce a joint venture with the U.S. government's National Technical Information Service, a program I've dubbed 'FedFlix.' Each month NTIS will send us 10-20 videotapes, which we'll digitize, then send the tapes back. We'll upload all this public domain data to places like the Internet Archive, and also give the NTIS a digital copy of their data."

[Thanks BoingBoing!]