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USPTO to hold public meeting on Data Dissemination RFI Oct 19 at SF Public Library
Last month we blogged about the US Patent and trademark Office (USPTO) and their RFI to outsource their data. Carl Malamud and several others (including Stanford University Librarian Michael Keller) wrote to the USPTO requesting a public meeting on the west coast to discuss the RFI that, "seeks to obtain information from interested parties, including the vendor community, about potential opportunities to acquire patent and trademark data in bulk (my emphasis) and to provide such data to the public without cost. The USPTO is seeking comments on the identified problem and solutions that will make the data available to the public without charge." If you're free on Monday, October 19th from 10:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. PST, please go to the SF Public Library in order to participate in this important public meeting. John Owens, USPTO CIO, mentions in his email (below) that registration is limited to the first 50 and interested people need to email your name, company, company address, and e-mail address topublicdatadissemination@uspto.gov NO LATER THAN OCTOBER 15. Please help us have a strong showing for free access to and preservation of digital patents and trademarks. Let the USPTO know that commodifying and privatizing public domain government information is not ok and does not meet President Obama's directive on Transparency and Open Government.
Greetings, Due to overwhelming interest from the patent and trademark community, the USPTO has scheduled a second public meeting to be held Monday, October 19th from 10:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Pacific time at the San Francisco Public Library located at 100 Larkin Street (at Grove), San Francisco, CA 94102-4733 in the Latino/Hispanic Community Room B. As with the first public meeting, the purpose is to address questions about the Request for Information (RFI). The full details of the Data Dissemination RFI, along with registration information and information from the first public meeting, are available on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site Those parties that are interested in attending must send, no later than Thursday, October 15, 2009, 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, the attendee’s name, company, company address, and e-mail address topublicdatadissemination@uspto.gov. Registration will be limited to the first 50 registrants. For directions please call (415) 557-4400. The contract officer is:Continue reading
V'Anne Tugbang
Contracting Officer
Office of Procurement
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office
Department of Commerce
600 Dulany Street, MDE-7C07
Alexandria, VA 22313-1450
p. 571.272.6550
f. 571.273.6550 We look forward to seeing you. Sincerely, John B. Owens II
Chief Information Officer
United States Patent and Trademark Office
USPTO latest agency looking to outsource their data
[UPDATE: Michael Keller, University Librarian at Stanford University (and my boss), wrote a letter to USPTO as well. Thanks Carl for posting it to scribd.] Carl Malamud made me aware (see his letter to USPTO CIO John Owens below) of a posting on FedBizOpps of a Request for Information (RFI) from the US Patent and Trademark Office:
"This RFI seeks to obtain information from interested parties, including the vendor community, about potential opportunities to acquire patent and trademark data in bulk (my emphasis) and to provide such data to the public without cost. The USPTO is seeking comments on the identified problem and solutions that will make the data available to the public without charge."While there is mention in the RFI of IP data being easily accessible to the public, there's no mention of data.gov. This seems to be purely a "no-cost" way for USPTO to upgrade their IT infrastructure by giving away public domain information. This is worrisome on so many levels as it is just one more example of a government agency looking to outsource and privatize public domain information *and* its IT infrastructure -- see for example the Thomson West contract with the GAO to digitize their legislative histories. Additionally, in a vague nod to transparency, USPTO will be holding 1 (yes only 1) vendor information meeting on Sept 24. I'm not sure how USPTO thinks that a 2 week notice for a meeting held in DC will help the cause of transparency. Shouldn't they have several meetings in different geographic locations to talk about such a huge and important public resource (nearly 2 petabytes of data!!)? Luckily, this is only at the RFI stage, not RFP stage. USPTO is currently only looking for information on how to do this. This is the time for the government information/transparency communities to submit ideas for how the USPTO could make their patent information available *without* giving it away to vendors. Please contact the USPTO at the addresses below and give them ideas for making their data open, standardized and freely available in bulk. Public Meeting:
Thursday, 24 September 2009
9:00 a.m. -11:00 a.m.
USPTO Campus in the Madison Auditorium
600 Dulany Street
Alexandria, VA, 22314 Contracting Office Address:
P. O. Box 1450 - Mail Stop 6
600 Dulany Street, MDE, 7th Floor
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 Primary Point of Contact.:
publicdatadissemination@uspto.gov
Secondary Point of Contact:
V. Anne Tugbang,
Contracting Officer
vanne.tugbang@uspto.gov
Phone: 5712726550
Fax: 5712736550
Good news and bad news about UK GIS data
Today, some mixed good news/bad news about the availability of free public data in the UK. As we've noted here before (e.g., Privatized Data Woes in Britain and News from abroad: UK open statutes & RFID in Canadian coins and The Semantic Web + Government Information = Serendipitous Reuse) the British government sells limited-use licences to its GIS data on a cost recovery basis. Now, as part of a proposed national geoportal, the UK would "create a single point of entry on the web to data held by public bodies such as local councils, Ordnance Survey (OS), the British Geological Survey and the Environment Agency." But, as the story says, "A new system will make geospatial information available without charge - yet we'll still have to pay."
- An Inspired debate on access, by Michael Cross, The Guardian, May 22 2008.
First, some very good news. Civil servants revealed last week that the British government has begun work on a system to make all the geospatial data it holds on the natural environment available for free inspection and re-use. Now the bad news. In this context, "free" means we will still have to pay to download much key data, especially if it is to be published or otherwise used commercially.Continue reading
Privatized Data Woes in Britain
While FGI normally focuses on US government information policy issues, there is a conflict going on in the UK that mirrors some of the recent stories about public data being used by private companies in a privileged way, forcing the taxpayer to pay twice for their data. An April 17, 2008 Guardian article titled A costly 2008 Domesday Book details how not one, but two British agencies contracted with commercial companies to post government compiled data. The result:
After seven years of legal wrangling, an official, complete and constantly updated list of addresses in England and Wales is about to become available for commercial use. The National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), compiled from data supplied by local councils, is being promoted as the best list of property addresses since the Domesday Book. Free data it is not. Although prices have yet to be finalised, the commercial firm hosting the service said this week it will cost between £15,000 and £20,000 a year. Profits will be shared among local authorities to help them keep data up to date. The gazetteer is not the only address database on the market. The state-owned Ordnance Survey also offers addresses as part of its MasterMap digital geographical database of Britain.Most of the article is about campaigns to free the data. In analyzing the roadblocks, they talk about issues that will be familiar to US readers:
"We would like to give it away free," says Nicholson. However, he says, local authorities are not going to give their work away when they have to pay for the use of postcodes from the Royal Mail's Postcode Address File. Neither can Ordnance Survey, which is required by the Treasury to show a return on its activities, and regards MasterMap as a key part of its revenue-generating portfolio.We wish the Free Our Data campaign well. This is probably a good to time to mention that what FGI objects to isn't the selling of data per se, but the selling of data that has already been compiled at taxpayer expense. If a private company wanted to raise its own venture capital, compile its own address list completely independent of government sources, we'd be all for it charging whatever the market could bear. But a private entity should not be allowed to be the sole, fee-based dispenser of information that has been compiled by government agencies using money confiscated through taxation. THAT's what we're against. Continue reading
A comment on government contracts and harvesting
April 16, 2008 / 2 Comments on A comment on government contracts and harvesting
Over the past week, there have been some good conversations about government contracts to digitize government information and the National Archives decision to not conduct a web harvest or snapshot at the end of the current Administration. There is good news and bad news.
The good news
The good news is that NARA's decision was not nearly as bad as it appeared to be when it was first announced in a memo on March 27, 2008, which was circulated only to Federal records officers (see: The National Archives Is Quietly Destroying Millions of Documents). In a thoughtful post on its web site (National Archives and Records Administration Web Harvest Background Information, April 15, 2008, NARA; pdf version available), NARA outlines in detail the reasons why it would not conduct an end of administration web snapshot or harvest of Executive Branch websites nor require agencies to do so. The reasons, I think, are sound and in keeping with NARA's commitment to preserving information of historical value.
In addition, the NARA memo of April 15 makes explicit the fact that its decision and memo of March 27 do not apply to Presidential records or to records of the Congress. It says that "NARA will continue to conduct a web harvest of Congressional web sites" and that NARA "will also receive a snapshot of the White House website" noting that "Unlike Federal agencies governed by the Federal Records Act, the White House is governed by the Presidential Records Act, under which all Presidential records are treated as permanent and transferred to NARA for preservation at a Presidential Library."
The NARA "Background Information" document is also, I think, worth reading for its clear description of the shortcomings of web harvests in general. I think it is very useful for us to be reminded of these shortcomings to the extent that we believe we can rely on them as an adequate form of preservation.
In more good news, the NARA/TGN contract is not as bad as it could have been. I mentioned this in my earlier post here (The NARA/TGN contract as a bad precedent) and similar comments have been made in the useful and interesting thread over at ArchivesNext (NARA latest digitization agreement: One archivist's perspective). Merrilee Proffitt, of RLG, says in a comment there that the NARA model for contracts with third parties "actually comes out looking pretty good" when compared to the criteria described in the RLG paper Good Terms - Improving Commercial-Noncommercial Partnerships for Mass Digitization (by Peter B. Kaufman and Jeff Ubois, D-Lib Magazine, November/December 2007, Volume 13 Number 11/12).
The bad news
The bad news, as James pointed out this morning, is that the GAO contract for digitizing is very bad indeed (GAO *did* sell exclusive access to legislative history to Thomson West). Quoting Carl Malamud, James notes that GAO gets access to the digitized data but does not get a copy of its own; the rest of the government doesn't even get access to the data. The public is left with the option of going to GAO headquarters and paying 20 cents per page to copy paper! As Carl says, "This is one of those deals where the public domain got sold off."
This morning there was more bad news. Kate at ArchivesNext reports that the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has a new report Record Chaos: The Deplorable State of Electronic Record Keeping in the Federal Government, that concludes "that the federal government is severely mismanaging its electronic records." CREW also says that a House Committee proposal to amend federal record keeping laws "is anemic and fails to make the substantial changes necessary to bring the federal government into the 21st century."
And even the good news is tempered by the fact that we have less than we could and are a long way from an even an adequate system of permanent preservation of digital information or a long-term solution to digitizing non-digital information. We will have to hope that the White House will deliver a snapshot of the White House web site and that the snapshot will be accurate and complete. The behavior of the White House with regard to electronic records and email does not make us optimistic. The NARA/TGN deal is better than the GAO/Thomson deal, but still leaves much to be desired and, as pointed out even by defenders of the deal, it is unlikely that we will ever have free, open, networked access to the digital information that TGN digitizes. That means the real effect of the deal is to privatize the information.
Comment
For me, the biggest disappointment in these latest developments is that librarians and archivists seem to be too willing to accept "good enough" and not willing enough to argue harder for "better." There are lots of people who have good reason to argue for less access, more fees, less privacy, and more control of information, but librarians and archivists should not be among them. I believe that we should not spend time making the case for the private sector; it is fully capable of making its own case. We should spend our time fighting for free, full, open, public access, usability of information, and long term preservation.
The primary mission of private sector companies is to make money, not to serve the public. They may serve the public as a by-product of making money, but no for-profit company will go to its owners and say "we are going to do the best thing for public access" without the qualification "that will make us money." Unfortunately "making money" often conflicts with public access. Politicians (and some bureaucrats) will argue for greater control of government information; some will argue for secrecy of government information on the one hand and privacy-invading policies on the other. Most government agencies do not have information access or long term preservation of their information as a primary mission and the exceptions are notable (e.g. LOC, NARA).
In contrast, the primary mission of many libraries and archives is to provide free public open access with long term preservation and usability. While others may have some of those pieces as secondary goals, few if any have them all. For many libraries and archives these goals are not just their primary mission but their defining characteristic.
While digitization and digital preservation are neither easy nor inexpensive, that doesn't mean that we have to pay any and all costs for them. The digital era should be making it possible to provide better access without giving up free use and reuse, without giving up open access, without turning over control to those whose primary mission is something other than free, open, public access and long term preservation. But increasingly we see a combination of politics and economics leaving us with contracts that trump copyright and fair use, with "access" being negotiated at almost any cost (including loss of control), with DRM technologies that prohibit easy (or any) reuse, and with privacy protections being deprecated or even ignored. Even in the case of the NARA/TGN contract that is legally "better" than the GAO/Thomson contract, we are left with the effect of two-tiers of access and network access being essentially privatized and fee-based.
I believe that librarians and archivists should be pushing the boundaries and insisting for more and better, not accepting some benefits by negotiating away the big benefits we could be getting in the digital age. This is particularly important for government information that is in the public domain. If we can't make this work for public information that is not copyrighted, how will we be able to do so for information that is?
I'm not arguing for a perfect, ideal world that is impractical to achieve. I am suggesting that we should fight for everything we can get. We should celebrate when we make inroads with a contract (like NARA/TGN) that is better than the others (like GAO/Thomson) but we should do so by committing to doing better next time. We should not accept this as "good enough" -- because it is not and we can do better next time. In fact, every time we accept a less-than-perfect deal as "good enough," we make it a little harder to make a better deal next time. We lower the bar if we accept "good enough" and stop trying to achieve better. We should not take the time to convince ourselves or the public that this is as good as we can get; we should take that time to admit to the limitations and trade offs and to commit to doing better next time.
There is lots written these days about "the future of libraries" and "the role of libraries in the digital age" and many people openly wonder if there is a place for libraries at all. I think there are several places where libraries have a unique role to play in society and the areas of digitization and digital access and preservation are important ones.
We need to make the case for the public; for free, open, public access; for long-term preservation and usability; for public accountability in the control of information; for reader privacy. Librarians and archivists have a unique role in doing that. In doing so, we will face an uphill battle and trade offs, but we should never lose sight of our unique role in society. We should never cheapen our professions by making the case for less (there are plenty of people to do that). We should always make the case for more. We will not always succeed and we will have to make trade offs. But we should always do so in the context of staking out a territory that is different from the private sector and those who are willing to get less. We should stand up for rights that others are not willing to fight for. We must fight for it when there are so many forces aligned against free, open access.
I'd like to see us emulate Carl Malamud and CREW and Brewster Kahle more and do less of making excuses for TGN and Thomson.
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