Is It Time For A Federal Scanning Commission?
from the yes-we-scan? dept
We just wrote about the move by the House Oversight Committee to put hours upon hours of archive footage of hearings up on YouTube, led by Carl Malamud, who (we noted) is always working on interesting projects to make government data more accessible. Carl Malamud, himself, wrote in (actually, before we posted that other story -- so he must have known we were about to write about him!) to alert us to another project he's working on: trying to get the government to create a Federal Scanning Commission, to focus on scanning tons of government content and putting it online. As he says:Locked in our federal vaults is a tremendous storehouse of information that if digitized would form a core for our digital public libraries in America with huge benefit for our country: cutting costs in the Federal government, creating jobs throughout America, and revolutionizing how we educate our citizens, how we practice the law, and how we create news, art, and scholarly works.There's also one of those White House petitions to go along with this program... This would be a big project, but it seems like one government project that would be worthwhile.
Imagine if the riches contained in the National Archives, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Government Printing Office, National Library of Medicine, National Agricultural Library, National Technical Information Service, and scores of other federal organizations were made available, becoming the core of a national effort to make access to knowledge a right for all Americans. The dream is a big one, but if we do not begin the questions of what it would take to get there, we will never start down that road. Today, we don't know what it would take.
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Filed Under: carl malamud, federal scanning commission, government archives, scanning, transparency
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Too Risky
That’s why it can’t be allowed.
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having just been through the TSA gamut....
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Re: having just been through the TSA gamut....
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Public Domain
The main problem in all this is that the United States has a mandatory copyright term on all audio recordings that expires somewhere around 2068. So this can be Public Domain as in silent or Public Domain as in released control for the public good.
Then let us not forget that third party productions can usually be subject copyright protection even if tax payer money funded the whole production.
This all reflects how Public Domain media, even Government sourced, is treated like trash next to copyright media. At least vast volumes of media is available for conversion and much of this is quite quick and easy.
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Re: Public Domain
HAHAHA, in your dreams. It wont ever expire, it will just get more extensions. Face it, its infinity+95years.
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Re: Re: Public Domain
HAHAHA, in your dreams. It wont ever expire, it will just get more extensions. Face it, its infinity+95years.
Laugh all you want but before this Federal level copyright term audio recordings were subject to state law and many of those did grant eternal protection.
So we moved from no hope to slim hope.
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Re: having just been through the TSA gamut....
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Re: Too Risky
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Re: Too Risky
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Objective
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Re: Re: Too Risky
/sarc
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Re: Re: Public Domain
Legal it has to be "for a limited time" so it has to be "Forever minus a short period"
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Re: Re: Public Domain
Legally it has to be "for a limited time" so it has to be "Forever minus a short period"
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You should keep dreaming..
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That would be tearing down a multi-billion dollar industry...
I think it should be done one step at a time, and we'll start with publishing ALL enacted and proposed laws which pass through Congress to include who wrote it, and who they get paid by, and who else gets paid by the same source and whether they voted yay or nay on the bill.
We'll install a guillotine next to every exit of the Congressional floor to streamline the execs.
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