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Financial Crisis Commission report released to the cloud

The final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was released on Thursday. Or as Frank Portnoy, in a NYT opinion piece today described it, three reports: “a 410-page volume signed by the commission’s six Democrats, a leaner 10-pronged dissent from three of the four Republicans, and a nearly 100-page dissent-from-the-dissent filed by Peter J. Wallison, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.”

GPO has quickly created a purl for the report (http://purl.fdlp.gov/GPO/gpo3449) which is linked to from the commission’s Web site (and already available from Marcive and embedded in my library’s catalog record). But what’s more interesting is that the main link to the commission report — http://c0182732.cdn1.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/fcic_final_report_full.pdf — is actually hosted on RackSpace, a cloud Web services company. It’s interesting not only because the commission decided to publish their report with a private company — and one not even listed at the GSA’s apps.gov portal for .gov contracting of cloud services — but that they couldn’t even spoof the url so it *looked* like it was coming from a .gov server.

This brings into question whether the commission’s report is in the public domain as it is actually hosted on a non-.gov server. I’ve collected it with the Stanford library’s EEMs tool (here’s a project briefing from fall 2010 CNI meeting brief about Everyday Electronic Materials (EEMs)). But part of the EEMs process is a workflow for managing copyright issues. I’m assuming it IS in the public domain as the work of an official US govt organ, but how would Stanford University’s general counsel (or IP lawyers in general) read this? This will no doubt be a growing and ongoing concern.

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