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Malamud Challenges C-SPAN
In an email (27 Feb 2007) to Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, Carl Malamud proposes to purchase from the C-Span store its entire inventory of 6,251 videos of congressional hearings "for the purpose of ripping and posting on the Internet in a nonproprietary format for reuse by anybody." Malamud says:
Holding congressional hearings hostage is not in keeping with your charter, and it is not in keeping with the spirit of that grand bargain you made with the American people. Please re-release this material back into the public domain where it came from so that it will continue to make our public civic life richer.
Malamud was instrumental in getting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to make its data available through the EDGAR database.
More here:
- Internet Watchdog Picks A 'Fair Use' Fight With C-Span by Andrew Noyes, National Journal's Technology Daily, March 2, 2007 PM edition [subscription required]
William Patry, a senior copyright counsel for Google, said on his blog that "the very transparency in government C-Span purports to seek is antithetical to claims of ownership in the events as recorded." Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig said ... that as more takedown notices are ordered for video remixes of political events, an advocate is needed "to take the lead to assure that the Web can be used for politics (without the mess of copyright)." An Internet-led reform effort called The Open House Project also has taken an interest in the C-Span debate.Continue reading
Access to Presidential Records Diminished
Yesterday, there was a hearing on the problems of access to Presidential records: "The Presidential Records Act of 1978: A Review of Executive Branch Implementation and Compliance," held by the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The Chronicle of Higher Education says,
Public access to presidential records came under scrutiny in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday as a panel of archivists, historians, and lawyers told a subcommittee about threats to access, and lawmakers introduced two bipartisan bills that would reform key aspects of how presidential documents are preserved and controlled.
- In Testimony and New Bills, Historians and Lawmakers Urge Protection of Access to Presidential Records, by Jennifer Howard, The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 2, 2007) [subscription required] (Available without subscription for a few days here)
According to Thomas Blanton, the Executive Director of the National Security Archive, the government has added five years of delay into the process of releasing presidential records.
- The Presidential Records Act in Crisis National Security Archive (March 1, 2007)
Agencies that block search engines
Peter Suber reports on National Library of Medicine and National Science Foundation sites that limit access to indexing of those sites and a possible explanation for that limitation.
- Government OA sites that limit crawling, by Peter Suber, Open Access News, (3/01/2007)
We've reported on this before, See: Do agencies exclude search engines?.
Continue readingHouse Testimony of Tim Berners-Lee on Net Neutrality
Berners-Lee: Congress should consider net neutrality by Grant Gross, ITworld.com (3/1/07)
Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, advocated that the U.S. Congress protect net neutrality and questioned the value of digital rights management Thursday. Berners-Lee, speaking before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in the U.S. House of Representatives, said it was "very, very important" for lawmakers to protect the ability of users to access the Web content they want regardless of their Internet service provider.Continue reading
James A. Jacobs
Jim Jacobs (James A. Jacobs) is Data Services Librarian Emeritus, University of California San Diego. He is one of the co-creators of FreeGovInfo.info. Jim is a librarian, teacher, trainer, researcher, writer, and consultant. He specializes in government information, providing data services in libraries, OAIS, TRAC, and digital library certification. Jim received his Bachelors degree from Oberlin College and his MSLS from University of Southern California.
Jim served as data services librarian at the University of California San Diego for more than 20 years. In other libraries, he has worked as state government publications librarian, Librarian for Instruction and International Documents, and Documents Librarian. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Public Data Users and the Administrative Committee of the International Association for Social Science Services and Technology. Since 1990, he has co-taught the ICPSR summer workshop, "Providing Social Science Data Services: Strategies for Design and Operation." He is a technical consultant to the Center for Research Libraries on matters dealing with long-lived repositories and the certification of digital archives.
Some of Jim's publications include Preserving research data by James A. Jacobs and Charles Humphrey. Communications of the ACM. Volume 47, Number 9 (2004); Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program by James A. Jacobs, James R. Jacobs, and Shinjoung Yeo, Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2005; Government Information in the Digital Era: Free Culture or Controlled Substance? by Karrie Peterson and James A. Jacobs, Symposium on Free Culture and the Digital Library 2005, Emory University, October 2005; Government Documents at the Crossroads, Karrie Peterson, Elizabeth Cowell, and Jim Jacobs. American Libraries 32(8) (September 2001): 52-55; and "The Technical is Political," Jim Jacobs, Karrie Peterson, Of Significance..., 3(1) 2001, p.25-35, Association of Public Data Users.
Jim can be reached at jajacobs at ucsd.edu
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