White House Makes Full Copyright Claim on Photos, by Kathy Gill The Moderate Voice (Feb 6th, 2010).

The U.S. government policy on photographs and copyright is pretty straightfoward: photos produced by federal employees as part of their job responsibilities are "not subject to copyright in the United States and there are no U.S. copyright restrictions on reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, or display of the work."

Why, then, is the Obama White House asserting that no one but "news organizations" can use its Flickr photos? Why is it asserting that manipulation is prohibited? Why is it asserting that photos may not be used in "commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House"?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/4331402906/

The recent "alliance" between the National Security Agency, (one of the most secret and secretive members of the U.S. intelligence community), and Google has brought up more questions than answers. Here are some recent stories:

• Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks, By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post (February 4,
  2010).

  "The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity."

• Google Asks Spy Agency for Help With Inquiry Into Cyberattacks, By JOHN MARKOFF, New York Times (February 4, 2010).

  'By turning to the N.S.A., which has no statutory authority to investigate domestic criminal acts, instead of the Department of Homeland Security, which does have such authority, Google is clearly seeking to avoid having its search engine, e-mail and other Web services regulated as part of the nation’s "critical infrastructure."'

• 'Don't Be Evil,' Meet 'Spy on Everyone': How the NSA Deal Could Kill Google, By Noah Shachtman, Wired (February 4, 2010).

  "The company pinkie-swears that its agreement with the NSA won’t violate the company's privacy policies or compromise user data. Those promises are a little hard to believe, given the NSA's track record of getting private enterprises to cooperate, and Google’s willingness to take this first step."

• Google, NSA ‘alliance’ has privacy advocate alarmed, By Stephen C. Webster, Raw Story, (February 4th, 2010).
   
• EPIC Seeks Records on Google-NSA Relationship, Electronic Privacy Information Center (February 4, 2010).

See also: Privacy: "I have nothing to hide".

Here is a point-by-point comparison of the big new data dissemination initiatives by the U.S. and the U.K.:

• Data.gov.uk versus Data.gov. Flowing Data (Feb 4, 2010).

While Data.gov.uk was just recently launched publicly, it has many advantages over Data.gov. It's easier to use and geared towards developers, who, let's face it, are the only ones who are going to do more with the data than open it up in Excel. Data.gov has some catching up to do. Both still have a long way to go. Both are good steps in the right direction.

Hat tip to Kevin Taglang at Benton Foundation!

The U.S. National Archives joins the Commons!, Flickr blog, (February 1, 2010).

Please welcome the U.S. National Archives to The Commons, the world’s public photography archives on Flickr to which you can contribute information and knowledge.

With over 3,000 images in 49 sets uploaded already, perusing these important archival images should keep you entertained for a long time. Their four collections encompass important Americana, ranging from the famous Mathew Brady Civil War images to historical and iconic images of American history.

The American Historical Association's AHA Today blog has a nice post today about the wealth of information in the National Agricultural Library’s Special Collections online.

• The Special Collections of the National Agricultural Library, by Elisabeth Grant, AHA Today (February 01, 2010).

It includes Rare Books, Nursery and Seed Trade Catalogs, The Thomas Jefferson Correspondence Collection, the USDA Pomological [the science of fruit breeding and production] Watercolor Collection, and more.

See also the The National Agricultural Library Digital Repository (NALDR) which "provides access to primarily historical USDA publications either digitized by NAL or through NAL’s partnerships with other institutions."

White House bars agencies from posting some statistics, by Aliya Sternstein, NextGov (01/27/2010).

According to this article, datasets posted to data.gov by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Peace Corps, the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service, the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation, and the Social Security Administration have been removed by the Office of Management and Budget "because they raised privacy, security or other concerns."

The article is based on work done by OpenTheGovernment.org which is tracking agency participation with the Open Government Directive here.

You almost certainly have seen at least one story in the past week about "Open Government" and the release of new data. Reporters have slowly been picking up on a massive release of information spurred by President Obama's Open Government Directive. (See: New 'high value' data posted to data.gov.)

Below are a few announcements and stories that you may find of interest.

But, in addition to all the data released this week was a new policy that will, potentially, affect usability of government information in the future. In the December 8, 2009 memo (Open Government Directive [pdf] Memorandum For The Heads Of Executive Departments And Agencies, M-10-06, Peter R. Orszag Director, Office of Management and Budget) that implemented the President's Open Government Initiative, OMB specifically mandates open file formats.

To increase accountability, promote informed participation by the public, and create economic opportunity, each agency shall take prompt steps to expand access to information by making it available online in open formats.

And, OMB defines open formats as:

An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.

This is big news for two reasons. First, it should lead the government away from proprietary formats which are hard to preserve, hard to re-use, and typically require either proprietary software or only operate on specific platforms, or both. Think: documents in ODF format rather than Microsoft Word. Second, the directive mandates formats "without restrictions [on] re-use." Think: no DRM (and no licensing restrictions!).

As the ODF Alliance noted back in December when the OMB memo was released, much of government information is still released in "documents" which are not ideal for re-use of information even when the document formats are open. But, this is still an important, essential step:

Like it or not, government bureaucracies are still very document-centric and there is a lot of government “data” stored in documents, the challenge being how to provide easy access to this data.

...With today's announcement, the Obama Administration has taken an important step on open government data and acknowledged the role open formats play in this regard. For document-centric governments, an open document format remains essential to delivering on this promise.
-- Obama Administration To Require Government Agencies to Make Information Available in Open Formats. ODF Alliance, December 08, 2009.

Open formats will help libraries that want to preserve digital government information by making it easier and less costly to do so.

Here are some of the announcements about releases of new government data:

• Open Government Initiative White House.
• Another Milestone In Making Government More Accessible and Accountable. White House.
• U.S. Government, OSTP, Open New Troves of Data to the Public
• Justice Department Announces Release of New Information Online as Part of President’s Open Government Initiative
• How "Open Gov" Datasets Affect Parents and Consumers. White House.
• Open Government Initiative. White House.

Government Posting Wealth of Data to Internet, By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, New York Times (January 22, 2010).

The Obama administration on Friday is posting to the Internet a wealth of government data from all Cabinet-level departments, on topics ranging from child car seats to Medicare services.

...Under a Dec. 8 White House directive, each department must post online at least three collections of "high-value" government data that never have been previously disclosed.

...All the new data collections will be added to the government's Web site, data.gov.

The United Kingdom has it's own version of data.gov and it has the added cachet of being promoted and advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

• data.gov.uk

  This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data. [T]his means it needs to be: easy to find; easy to licence; and easy to re-use. We are drawing on the expertise and wisdom of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt to publish government data as RDF – enabling data to be linked together.

• Tim Berners-Lee unveils government data project, BBC (21 January 2010).

  Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee has unveiled his latest venture for the UK government, which offers the public better access to official data.

  A new website, data.gov.uk, will offer reams of public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use.

As announced last year, Google Scholar searches now include legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate, and supreme courts. An earlier review said that it would not replace commerical case law providers but that it does offer is an amazing place to start case research. A new review echoes those findings:

• Google Scholar: A New Way to Search for Cases and Related Legal Publications, By David Tsai and Courtney Minick, LLRX (December 30, 2009). [Previously Posted by: The Bar Association of San Francisco, republished with permission.]

...Google Scholar will not replace commercial legal publishers such as LexisNexis® or Westlaw® any time soon. The value in paid services lies mostly in the editorial work they provide on top of caselaw -- e.g., headnotes and cite checking features...

Something else to keep in mind -- Google Scholar is limited to case law, and does not include statutes or regulations...

All together, many lawyers have concluded that Google Scholar is a great place to conduct preliminary research, or to review new cases that have not yet been affected by precedent.

More than once here at FGI we have lamented the fact that newspapers have not used the web to link to documents (of all kinds, not just government publications) that they cite. The New York Times is doing a better job of this than most.

I recently realized that they even have a server named documents.nytimes.com. I noticed this when following a story (Army History Finds Early Missteps in Afghanistan, By James Dao, December 30, 2009) about a new, unpublished Army history of the war in Afghanistan.

The report, "A Different Kind of War," was "written by a team of seven historians at the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and based on open source material, it is scheduled to be published by spring." The Times posted the document online http://documents.nytimes.com/a-different-kind-of-war#p=1 , but not as a PDF or other downloadable format, but as a series of page-images. I would certainly prefer to see the option of downloading the entire document and can't see why the Times didn't provide that option. (There are no ads on the pages I viewed, so it isn't a matter of forcing you to view an ad for every page you read.) Presumably the published version will be available for downloading and preservation, but it would be better if this version was also available for downloading and preservation. That would make it easier for scholars to use now and easier to compare changes when the final version is released.

I also noticed that, if you go to the root web directory of the Times documents web site (http://documents.nytimes.com) you are redirected to http://documents.nytimes.com/atom which is an RSS (actually "atom" -- a similar format) feed of documents posted. That is excellent!

The Hill Reports that there is yet another service tracking government tweets:

• New site tracks government-run Twitter accounts. By Jordan Fabian The Hill (01/04/10).

The site is GovLive, which aggregates "all government news releases in one place" and aims to "be the first comprehensive search engine for finding local government news in real-time." Its tweets page gives a real-time "bird's-eye view of official government Twitter feeds across the US" and allows you to filter by State or County!

The Hill says GovLive tracks 68,031 tweets from 540 agencies.

Other services that are tracking government tweets include:

• a list of Twitter accounts from Cabinet Secretaries, Agencies and Departments by The White House
• GovTwit
• Tweet Congress
• Congressional 140
• GovFresh
• Members of Congress who Twitter
• Capitol Tweets

This promises to be a very interesting conference! If you are going and will be blogging or tweeting, please let us know. (admin at freegovinfo.info)

• LIMITING KNOWLEDGE IN A DEMOCRACY A Social Research conference at The New School, New York City, February 24-26, 2010. www.socres.org/limitingknowledge

Join award winning journalists, distinguished scholars, and policy makers to examine how the U.S. government and other political and cultural institutions distort or otherwise affect the flow of information. What limits on access to knowledge safeguard our democracy and what limits erode it?

Keynote: Seymour Hersh

Featured Speakers:
Steven Aftergood
David D. Aufhauser
Ronald Bayer
Christopher Capozzola
Julie E. Cohen
Daniel Ellsberg
Peter L. Galison
Rebecca Goldstein
Glenn Greenwald
Dale Jamieson
Philip Kitcher
Nicholas Lemann
Eric Lichtblau
Michael Oppenheimer
Daniel Sarewitz
Jonathan Zittrain

Over three days, the conference will investigate how our government and other political and cultural institutions organize, fund, restrict, facilitate, or otherwise affect the flow of knowledge, and examine how limits may support or undermine democracy. Speakers will examine the government and technological structures and mechanisms that limit transparency, the influence of private interests and government over media and the propagation of misinformation, and the host of other powerful forces surrounding policy-making that curtail our knowledge and threaten our privacy.

We will also look at other institutions that significantly affect what we can know, what we ought to know and what we should try to know, including the research community itself, as well as the implicit limits located within our culture that strongly influence what we seek to know and what we are content not to know.

And, we will discuss the role of whistleblowers and investigative journalism to uphold public accountability.

These issues will be addressed from the perspectives of government policy, political science, public health, history, science, economics, media, law, journalism, and philosophy.

THOMAS, the legislative information service hosted by the Library of Congress, has announced new long-needed features and enhancements.

• What's New in THOMAS

These include:

• Bookmarking. Yes, it is now easy to save a permanent link to a page in THOMAS.
• Easy sharing. The same toolbar that gives you a permanent URL, has links for sharing a page using popular sites such as Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter.
• New RSS feed: Bills Presented to the President.
• Top Five Bills. "The five most-searched-for bills from the past week will be listed in the center box on the right side of the homepage." They are listed by bill number, but hovering over them gives you a name.

See the link above for the complete list of features.

(Wow. Bookmarking. What a concept for 2010!)

C-SPAN complains about private health talks, by Foon Rhee, Boston Globe (January 5, 2010).

Democrats' apparent decision to come up with a final health care bill not only behind closed doors but within a very select group of negotiators is drawing criticism not only from expected quarters, but from the media.