Bulk copyright records opened up—after ‘blogospheric brouhaha’
Sixteen million copyright records from the U.S. Copyright Office are now available in bulk, thanks to the efforts of Carl Malamud (left), Peter Brantley and others.
No more will the feds charge tens of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to the copyright catalog of of monographs, documents, and serials. Way to go, guys! Nothing like “a bit of a blogospheric brouhaha” to stir things up, eh? Now, here’s the fun part. The government had attracted only two subscribers, given the outrageous fees.
Good beyond public domain community and academia
Washington’s fresh sanity on these matters should be good news not just to the public domain community but also to some people on the commercial side, who, thanks to better resources online, may save time and money as they go about making reproductions or derivative works of items found to be in the PD. From Peter Brantley:
“In a voicemail that Marybeth Peters, the U.S. Register of Copyrights, left for Carl Malamud, Ms. Peters clarified that there is no copyright on any of the Copyright Office records; that they are ‘public records’ and they should be ‘openly available.’ Ms. Peters identified the Library of Congress’ Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS) as the unit responsible for providing access to the database; the CDS asserts it was mandated by the U.S. Congress to provide this service ‘at a charge of production and distribution cost plus 10%.’ Carl and I have learned they have only two customers for this particular ‘product’ and we don’t quite get the business model behind this constitutionally-mandated database.
“The Library of Congress has responded to our request to fully release the database solely by describing it as ‘a bit of a blogospheric brouhaha over what the Library of Congress charges.’
“We’re sympathetic with the desire of the Library to raise revenues, but this product isn’t theirs to sell. These are public records and all 16 million records of the database are now available in bulk, without restrictions [http | ftp].”
Popularity: 9% [?]
October 1st, 2007 at 12:06 pm
[…] Guild_of_Abundance wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt […]
October 1st, 2007 at 3:01 pm
[…] an article found over at TeleRead that should be of great interest to Project […]