Earlier Erika wrote about Carl Malamud and his public.resource.org codes.gov site. Today our friend and hero Carl is the subject of a story in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Man provides code manuals free online
Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
The San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday, September 27, 2008, p. B1
. . .
“Not everybody is going to read the building code, but everybody who wants to should be able to without putting 100 bucks in the slot,” Malamud said. “Primary legal materials are America’s operating system.”
. . .
“It’s very clear in American law that you can’t get intellectual property protection for law,” said Pamela Samuelson, co-director of the UC Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. “Law belongs to everybody.”
. . .
“This stuff has been locked up behind a cash register,” Malamud said. “(It’s) way too important to just leave it there.”
I especially enjoyed reading the comments — all favorable — and note that Carl is not just our hero:
Yep! This guy is my hero. When I had to repair parts of my house up “to code” I was like, “Okay, where’s the code book? Let me read up on it…” When I found out it wasn’t available for free from a government website (the most obvious place for it!) I was shocked. It just made NO sense…
. . .
Its about time!! I am a retired building contractor and I say its about time the public had ready access to laws like this that they are controlled by. if youre controlled by a law or regulation, you should have free and ready access to it Thanks, Mr Malamud
There are many more posted at SFGate.com.
Story update:
Carl is also the subject of a story in the September 29, 2008 New York Times:
Link By Link
By NOAM COHEN
The New York Times, Monday, September 29, 2008, p. C8
No less an authority than the United States Supreme Court has said that the
law and judicial decisions cannot be copyrighted, but in the real world,
judicial decisions and laws and regulations can be exceedingly hard to find
without paying for them, either in book form or online. . . .
. . .
Into this maze of fuzzy law and competing ownership claims enters Carl Malamud, who for 15 years or so has used the Internet to liberate information that nominally exists in the public domain. He has pulled up federal court decisions, corporate filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission and, in an example of near performance art, the copyright registrations at the United States Copyright Office.
“So many people have been moving into the public domain and putting up fences,” he said in an interview from his office in Sebastopol, Calif., where he runs a one-man operation, public.resource.org, on a budget of about $1 million a year. Much of that money goes to buy material, usually in print form, that he then scans into his computer and makes available on the Internet without restriction.
. . .
As of Labor Day, he had put, he estimates, more than 50 percent of the nation’s 11 public safety codes online, including rules for fire prevention. “We have material from all 50 states, but we don’t have all 11 codes for all 50 states,” he said.
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