Carl Malamud on Public Information, Copyright

"There has been a lot of noise about orphan works in Washington, DC, about how there’s materials that were produced that are not available, that we can’t scan and make available because there’s potential copyright issues. And this vacuum of leadership in Washington, DC, has led private parties, like the Internet Archives, Google, and others, to wing it to try to figure out what to do. But it’s an area where librarians should be telling members of Congress and the executive branch leadership that this is a tremendously important issue. I don’t think I’ve seen that happening. I haven’t heard yelling and screaming in sufficient volume to impress people in...Washington, DC. The other thing that I think librarians really need to be aware of in the legal world is the amazing amount of money that libraries spend with the vendors. While budgets are being cut, it’s still a huge business, and I’m not convinced that the libraries have wielded sufficient muscle against vendors, such as journal publishers that have in a sense raped and pillaged your budgets. It’s sad to see how much money is spent on some of these resources and then how many locks are put on them at the same time. Not only do you pay big bucks to get this stuff, you can’t necessarily make it available."

"Google’s doing ten million books, then, jeez, why isn’t the Library of Congress doing 100 million or a billion books? Why aren’t it taking the lead and digitizing this. And why isn’t the Librarian of Congress going to the committees in Congress and saying there is an orphan works and particularly a fallow works problem—this issue of works that are just sitting out there, not getting used at all, not on the market, you can’t find the things; you’re lucky if you can go into a library and get them? In a few cases you can, but many of these works should be totally liberated and in the public domain as they were meant to be when we passed the copyright acts. Because remember that’s the whole point of the copyright acts: you can make some money off this, but then we all get it when you’re done.

The whole point of copyright is to promote the public domain. That’s not an incidental side effect. That is the reason the Founding Fathers put that in the Constitution."

Also includes a great overview of the federal government's digitization, information and computer system needs.

-LJ November 1, 2010 here