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Defense Department to privatize its public domain media archive

According to a recent GCN article “DOD wants you … to browse its visual library”  the US Department of Defense has entered into a “no cost” contract with a company called T3 Media to have them digitize DoD’s massive image and video archive. It seems that DoD employees will get free access to the digital archive, but T3 Media will receive a 10 year monopoly license to charge for public access to the archive.

This is not the first time that a federal agency has entered into “no cost” contracts to privatize its public domain information. A few years ago, GAO contracted w Thomson/West to digitize GAO’s archive of legislative histories of public laws 1915 – 1995. When will federal agencies realize that giving away the whole store does them and the public a HUGE disservice?!

According to Rick Prelinger who alerted us to the GCN article:

In exchange for covering a share of digitizing and hosting costs (the government will pick up an unspecified share of costs as well), T3 Media will provide access to the government and receive a 10-year exclusive license to charge for public access to these public domain materials.

I contacted T3Media’s communications manager who could only tell me that “the material will be available for licensing.” Costs, procedures and restrictions are still undecided or undisclosed. T3 will possess the highest-quality digital copies of these materials and there is no guarantee that DoD will offer them to the public online when the 10-year window expires. It’s therefore hard to know whether this contract will serve the public interest.

While I have not yet seen the contract, the project Statement of Objectives offers additional information and here’s T3Media’s release.

[HT BoingBoing!]

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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