New Best. Title. Ever.
Mon, 2008-03-17 18:46 — dcornwall
We hadn't added much to our Best. Titles. Ever. humor page lately. I'm happy to end that dry spell with a document that is both humorously titled and useful:
Hills Bros. coffee can chronology : field guide, published by U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management in 2006.
Why does the Bureau of Land Management care about what coffee cans looked like in the 1910s? For a very good reason. According to the document's introduction, Hill's Brothers Coffee cans are a great way to date digs dating back to the late 1800s because of the tendency of Hills Brothers to change their can designs every so often.
I'd love to copy and paste their explanation into this post, but I can't. The BLM authors chose to lock their PDF into a form that cannot be copied from. You can make copies of the entire file and you can print pages from it, but you can't copy and paste the text nor can you extract the pictures from it. Yet as a public domain government document, there is no legal reason to impose these kind of restrictions. This is part of the future we fear, one of crippled electronic documents that aren't as reusable as they could be. Today BLM has decided we can't copy and paste from a public domain document. Maybe another agency will decide tomorrow that we shouldn't be able to print their document. That's what faces us unless the federal government has a consistent policy that renounces Digital Rights Management (DRM).
**Addition by James: I've attached a PDF of the document from which I was able to copy and paste. Please download this copy and leave a comment if you're *not* able to copy and paste.
**Addition by Daniel: Thanks for the demonstrating the power of a polite request. It's nice to see responsive and helpful gov't agencies.
**Further addition by James: While I believe in the power of a polite request, this one was Jim working his magic to subvert the copy-blocking. He saved the original pdf, printed/saved as pdf (macs let you convert to pdf from the print menu!), jiggered a few things and then the DRM was foiled. That's the PDF doc that is attached to this discussion :-)
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| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| BLM_hillsbros_nodrm.pdf | 3.24 MB |
| logo-test-uploaded.gif | 1.85 KB |
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Comments
Dear Free Government
Dear Free Government Info,
Is this locked pdf from BLM a good target for my first ever FOIA filing? I'd be thrilled to do it if y'all can give a little guidance. Feel free to contact by email if you're so inclined, and keep up the great work!
Robert Link
4l @ North Western California University School of Law
DRM
That's scary, and frankly not thought of enough in the mass media. I hope our next administration, whoever that is, will renew our tradition of open government and access to information that we seemed to have lost, even in this internet age.
BTW, the fiscal conservative activists would have a ball with that title!! :))
Human error?
The locking of this document may be part of some larger insidious plot to restrict access (see the story I posted a couple of weeks ago about the VA instituting DRM to manage their internal documents). On the other hand, it may have been human error due to the settings that one of the authors had on their software. It's hard to know for sure without analyzing all of the PDFs from the BLM. Rather than a FOIA request, I'll drop the authors an email and see if they can change that setting. I'll keep y'all posted.
DRM-less document now available
We've attached the document here without those pesky copying limits. Please download and distribute widely. And if you can, download it to your own server and have the OCLC record point to the DRM-less version of the document.
Document available??
Was this document actually available at some point? Now when I click on the drm-less attachment James provided, it comes up as "page not found". Has it been redacted to preserve national security?
document now available
Hi Kathy. I tried to email you but the address you gave was not valid. We were having a bit of trouble with our file system, but things are now in order and the attached document is available for download. Sorry for the confusion.
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