Carl Malamud
Carl Malamud | |
---|---|
Born | July 2, 1959 |
Known for | Public.Resource.Org |
Notable work | Exploring the Internet, A World's Fair |
Awards | 2009 EFF Pioneer Award |
Carl Malamud (born July 2, 1959) is an American technologist, author, and
Malamud is the author of eight books, including Exploring the Internet and A World's Fair.[4][5] He was a visiting professor at the
Public domain activism
Malamud set up the nonprofit
He has also challenged the information management policy of
An early Internet pioneer, he is the author of many early books about networking such as Analyzing Novell Networks and DEC Networks and Architectures.[19][20]
In September 2015, Malamud published a petition to the Government of the United Kingdom, calling for it to make the safety standards published by the European Union for toy safety freely available, rather than allowing them to continue being only available at high cost and subject to restrictive terms of use.[21]
PACER
In 2008, Malamud contended that the federal court archive Public Access to Electronic Court Records, which was charging 8 cents per page, should instead be providing the information for free, because government documents are not protected by copyright.[22][23] The fees were "plowed back to the courts to finance technology, but the system [ran] a budget surplus of some $150 million, according to court reports," reported The New York Times.[22] PACER used technology that was "designed in the bygone days of screechy telephone modems ... put[ting] the nation's legal system behind a wall of cash and kludge."[22] Malamud appealed to fellow activists, urging them to visit one of 17 libraries conducting a free trial of the PACER system, download court documents, and send them to him for public distribution.[22]
After reading Malamud's call for action,
The Huffington Post characterized his actions this way: "Swartz downloaded public court documents from the PACER system in an effort to make them available outside of the expensive service. The move drew the attention of the FBI, which ultimately decided not to press charges as the documents, were, in fact, public."[25]
On September 29, 2008,
At a 2013 memorial for Swartz, Malamud recalled their work with PACER. They brought millions of U.S. District Court records out from behind PACER's "pay wall", he said, and found them full of privacy violations, including medical records and the names of minor children and confidential informants.
We sent our results to the Chief Judges of 31 District Courts ... They redacted those documents and they yelled at the lawyers that filed them ... The Judicial Conference changed their privacy rules. ... [To] the bureaucrats who ran the Administrative Office of the United States Courts ... we were thieves that took $1.6 million of their property. So they called the FBI ... [The FBI] found nothing wrong ...[27]
Malamud penned a more detailed account of his collaboration with Swartz on the Pacer project in an essay.[28]
Writing in Ars Technica, Timothy Lee, who later made use of the documents obtained by Swartz as a co-creator of RECAP, offered some insight into discrepancies in reporting on just how much data Swartz had downloaded: "In a back-of-the-envelope calculation a few days before the offsite crawl was shut down, Swartz guessed he got around 25 percent of the documents in PACER. The New York Times similarly reported Swartz had downloaded "an estimated 20 percent of the entire database". Based on the facts that Swartz downloaded 2.7 million documents while PACER, at the time, contained 500 million, Lee concluded that Swartz downloaded less than one percent of the database.[24]
State of Georgia statutes copyright decision
On October 18, 2018, a federal appeals court decision struck down the State of Georgia's attempt to claim that its officially published statutes were protected by copyright due to the addition of
Carl Malamud initiated the copyright challenge by purchasing the official printed works for more than $1200, digitally scanning the contents, and mailing the digital copies on
In 2013, the State of Georgia sued Malamud for providing the Official Code of Georgia Annotated on his website, borrowing his own word to describe it as "a successful form of 'terrorism'".[30][31][32]
The appeals court decision states:
- "... we conclude that the People are the ultimate authors of the annotations. As a work of the People the annotations are inherently public domain material and therefore uncopyrightable. Because we conclude that no copyright can be held in the annotations, we have no occasion to address the parties’ other arguments regarding originality and fair use."[33]
In 2019 Malamud expressed a wish for the matter to advance to the Supreme Court for clarification, despite the appellate court ruling in his favor.[34]
Other pending lawsuits
Carl Malamud is currently[when?] involved in several lawsuits through his organization Public.Resource.Org.[35]
Malamud's campaign to become US Public Printer
In 2009 Malamud announced his candidacy to become
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said that his agenda was "ambitious and impressive" and that if President Barack Obama granted him the position that it would be an excellent step toward fulfilling his promise to introduce "an unprecedented level of openness in Government."[36]
Recognition
In 2009 Malamud received the EFF Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for being a public domain advocate.[37]
Works
Malamud authored eight books as of 2009, including Exploring the Internet and A World's Fair.[37]
10 Rules for Radicals
10 Rules for Radicals is Malamud's keynote at the 19th
It sums up:[40]
- Rule 1: Call everything an experiment.
- Rule 2: When the starting gun goes off, run really fast. As a small player, the elephant can step on you, but you can outrun the elephant.
- Rule 3: Eyeballs rule. If a million people use your service, and on the Internet you can do that, you’ve got a lot more credibility than if you’re just issuing position papers and flaming the man.
- Rule 4: When the time comes, be nice.
- Rule 5: Keep asking until they say yes. Gordon Bell, the inventor of the VAX, once said that you should keep your vision, but modify your plan.
- Rule 6: When you get the microphone, get to the point. Be clear about what you want.
- Rule 7: Get standing. Have some skin in the game, some reason you’re at the table.
- Rule 8: Get them to threaten you.
- Rule 9: Look for overreaching, things that are just blatantly, obviously wrong or silly.
- And finally, rule 10, which is don’t be afraid to fail. It took Thomas Edison 10,000 times before he got the lightbulb right, and when he was asked about those failures, he said “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Fail. Fail often. And don’t forget, you can question authority.
References
- ^ "Internet Talk Radio". museum.media.org. Archived from the original on April 26, 2010. Retrieved May 30, 2010.
- ^ "Securities and Exchange Commission". public.resource.org. Retrieved May 30, 2010.
- ^ "Internet 1996 World Exposition". Retrieved May 30, 2010.
- ISBN 0-13-296898-3. Archived from the originalon May 13, 2008. Retrieved February 9, 2006.
- ISBN 0-262-13338-5.
- ^ Baker, Mitchell (November 22, 2006). "Bob Lisbonne and Carl Malamud Join the Mozilla Foundation Board". The Weblog of Mitchell Baker. Retrieved May 27, 2008.
- ^ Baker, Mitchell (May 22, 2007). "Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.Org". The Weblog of Mitchell Baker. Retrieved May 27, 2008.
- ^ "About Public.Resource.Org". resource.org.
- ^ "public.resource.org - ntis.gov". resource.org.
- ^ "public.resource.org - gpo.gov". resource.org.
- ^ "public.resource.org - oregon.gov". resource.org.
- ^ Halverson, Nathan. "He's giving you access, one document at a time". The Press Democrat. Archived from the original on September 4, 2008. Retrieved September 4, 2008.
- ^ O'Reilly, Tim (April 5, 2006). "Smithsonian Sunshine". O'Reilly Media, Inc. Retrieved May 27, 2008.
- ^ Malamud, Carl (May 25, 2006). "Testimony of Carl Malamud". Hearing on Smithsonian Institution Business Ventures. United States House of Representatives. Retrieved May 27, 2008.
- ^ Fallows, James (March 9, 2007). "Another win for Carl Malamud (or: news you won't see in the May 2007 issue of the Atlantic)". The Atlantic.com. Retrieved May 27, 2008.
- ^ Malamud, Carl (February 27, 2007). "Congressional Hearings, Fair Use, and the Public Domain". public.resource.org. Retrieved May 27, 2008.
- ^ Markoff, John (August 20, 2007). "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free". The New York Times. Retrieved May 27, 2008.
- ^ Doctorow, Cory (February 25, 2009). "Yes We Scan! Carl Malamud for Public Printer of the USA".
- ^
Malamud, Carl (July 1992). Analyzing Novell Networks (2nd ed.). Van Nostrand Reinhold. p. 340. ISBN 0-442-01302-7.
- ISBN 0-07-039822-4.
- ^ Malamud, Carl (September 4, 2015). "Petition to Her Majesty's Government on the Safety of Toys". Public.Resource.Org. Retrieved September 5, 2015.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Schwartz, John (February 12, 2009). "An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy". The New York Times. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
- ^ a b c d e f g Singel, Ryan (October 5, 2009). "FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records". Wired. Condé Nast. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
- ^ a b Lee, Timothy B.,The inside story of Aaron Swartz's campaign to liberate court filings, Ars Technica, February 8, 2013. Retrieved March 8, 2013.
- ^ Will Wrigley (February 7, 2013). "Darrell Issa Praises Aaron Swartz, Internet Freedom At Memorial". Huffingtonpost.com. Retrieved February 21, 2013.
- ^ Johnson, Bobbie (November 11, 2009). "Recap: Cracking open US courtrooms". The Guardian. London.
- ^ Malamud, Carl (January 24, 2013). Aaron's Army (Speech). Memorial for Aaron Swartz at the Internet Archive. San Francisco.
- ^ Malamud, Carl (March 30, 2013). "On Crime and Access to Knowledge: An Unpublished Essay".
- ^ Electronic Frontier Foundation news article, Appeals Court Tells Georgia: State Code Can’t be Copyrighted, By Joe Mullin, published October 23, 2018, Article URL: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/appeals-court-tells-georgia-state-code-cant-be-copyrighted Retrieved April 1, 2019
- ^ "Carl Malamud, Public Printer". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved April 29, 2020.
- ^ Los Angeles Times (July 27, 2015). "Georgia claims that publishing its state laws for free online is 'terrorism'". Los Angeles Times.
- ^ "Georgia accuses public records activist of information 'terrorism'". ajc.com.
- ^ Page 5 of Case: 17-11589, Filed: October 19, 2018, United States Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit, CODE REVISION COMMISSION, for the Benefit of and on behalf of General Assembly of Georgia, STATE OF GEORGIA vs PUBLIC.RESOURCE.ORG, INC., 55 pages, Document URL: http://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/201711589.pdf Retrieved April 1, 2019
- ^ Liptak, Adam (May 13, 2019). "Accused of 'Terrorism' for Putting Legal Materials Online". The New York Times.
- ^ St. Denis, Nick (January 26, 2016). "Cases Shed Light on Copyright Protection of Standards Developers".
- ^ a b c d Jones, Tim (March 2, 2009). "Yes We Scan: Carl Malamud for Public Printer". eff.org. Retrieved October 13, 2013.
- ^ a b Bishop, Katina (October 6, 2009). "Hardware Hacker, E-Voting Investigator, and Public Domain Advocate Win Pioneer Awards". eff.org. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved October 13, 2013.
- ^ "10 Rules for Radicals: Lessons from rogue archivist Carl Malamud". boingboing.net. August 29, 2010. Retrieved June 17, 2018.
- ^ ""10 Rules for Radicals": making PSI more accessible". communia-project.eu. COMMUNIA - The European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain. Retrieved June 17, 2018.
- ^ Carl Malamud (2010). 10 Rules for Radicals.
External links
- Public.Resource.Org
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Malamud, Carl (April 17, 2006). "Dear Secretary Small". Open letter. Center for American Progress.
Smithsonian Joint Venture With Showtime Raises Many Concerns