Scan and deliver

By G.F. | SEATTLE

CARL MALAMUD never thinks small and never shies away from a fight. The internet's co-archivist, who shares that unofficial title with Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive, has spent most of the past two decades cajoling, hectoring and teasing local and federal government entities in the United States to unlock the material they produce. Mr Malamud (pictured to the right) believes releasing such information spurs innovation by allowing private and non-profit firms to compete by coming up with better methods to present and analyse data.

In his latest effort, co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a think-tank in Washington, DC, he is prodding Barack Obama's administration to set comprehensive and coherent policy for digitising government information locked away in analogue form—to release it without restrictions. He thinks stumping up $250m a year to the venture is a good place to start.

Mr Malamud's non-profit Public.Resource.org has targeted the American government in particular because the United States foreswears copyright protection within its borders of work created by public employees. Some works by government contractors, or those donated or assigned to the government, may retain copyright. But the vast bulk of creations that would otherwise be protected under current terms is freely available—if one can get one's hands on it.

The government's multiple troves of resources which are, in theory, in the public domain, are often hard to access and sometimes made available only with restrictions. (For example, those at the Smithsonian Institute are the subject of a previous battle.) Information available solely in analogue formats, like paper or microfilm, may seem too abstruse to arouse anyone besides historians or academics. Yet perhaps it should, for it often comprises the fundaments of government actions which may have been enacted decades ago, but remain relevant today.

Like many archivists, Mr Malamud frets that analogue records are physically disintegrating, in part, he says, because those who created them it in the first place did such a poor job. (The latest effort does not concern the accessibility of previously digitised government documents or those originally created in digital form, which Mr Malamud and others address in other projects.)

Laws and associated legal records are a particular bugbear. Mr Malamud has fought battles on the state and federal level about access to the laws of the land. The United States, peculiarly, it seems, frequently commissions private firms to disseminate such material. This makes it impossible for citizens or their lawyers to pore over the law to which they or their clients are subject without paying. It is either that, or being granted access to an intractable array of huge, heavy legal tomes. "You can't really have rule of law if you have a poll tax on access to justice," Mr Malamud laments.

In 2008 Public.Resource.Org and the Creative Commons released all the decisions handed down by America's Supreme Court and its appeals courts from 1950 onwards. The outfit used money from donations to purchase the raw form of the records and convert them into well-formatted structured text, and to distribute them for free. But a raft remains locked away.

Separately, Mr Malamud wants the government to stake a sort of claim on material that it knows either to be available without restriction for works that would otherwise remain under copyright term or to be fully in the public domain. His FedFlix project to digitise films produced by the federal government has hit a snag as parties file claims at YouTube, which obeys the law and dutifully removes Mr Malamud's videos until he can prove he has the right to publish them. (The video collection is also available at Mr Kahle's Internet Archive.)

YouTube is not the problem, he says. On the contrary, the video-sharing website has been scrupulous and helpful. And some of the videos do in fact contain copyrighted songs, for instance, making take-down requests legitimate. Mr Malamud is not bent on shutting down private enterprise around government data. Rather, he would like to see opening up the data to allow more public and private institutions to make use of it, including selling access through unique tools.

In a time of budgetary cutbacks and revenue crises, the idea of creating a new organisation with a new budget may appear extravagant. But Mr Malamud's track record suggests it is not forlorn.

(Photo credit: a Creative Commons Attribution, via tvol's photostream at Flickr)