Scanning Boing Boing this morning for its usual daily meanderings through the underbelly of wonderful stuff on the web I find an interesting snippet titled Giving away the public domain docs the US gov charges money for

The piece points to http://public.resource.org/ and Carl Malamud, the site’s creator, is quoted as saying

public.resource.org has created a mirror of NTIS.Gov’s [National Technical Information Services] store that sells public domain materials. Our twist is that instead of sending you the materials, we’ll release them back into the public domain for everybody to use. We mashed some of the materials up in a little infomercial here.

In the US the law states that stuff produced by the federal government goes into the public domain. They don’t get the privilege of Copyright or any other protection over the contents of reports, photographs, papers or databases.

This doesn’t stop the government charging for them though.

The radical step taken at public.resource.org is to use a one-off purchase by a member of the public to free the data back into the public domain.

Casey Bison talked about releasing the LC data under a similar pattern of thinking, but with so much FUD around who may or may not own what data it looks like that hasn’t been organised just yet.

It’s a shame Library of Congress isn’t on the list at public.resource.org, or I may just have stumped up for it myself.

Found via Boing Boing