Carl Malamud

Carl Malamud is the founder of Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit that has been instrumental in placing government information on the Internet. Prior to that he was the Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress and was the founder of the Internet Multicasting Service, where he ran the first radio station on the Internet.

House.Resource.Org

Hundreds of high-res videos from House Oversight Committee hearings will be available on a new website.

Broadcast-quality video from the hearings of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform becomes available on the Internet.

The Report of Current Opinions

The Report of Current Opinions will be a weekly release of all slip and final opinions of all appellate and supreme courts in the United States.

Help us debug the Legal Bug Tracker

Got Bugs? The Legal Bug Tracker is now in Alpha. Help us fix our legal system.

Patent database up and running

U.S. Patent data that once carried a high access fee is now available for free online.

Thanks to a significant effort, 20 terabytes of U.S. patent data are now on the Internet and 50 more are on the way.

Law.Gov Update

Some of you may have noted
today’s Google 10^100 announcement which has resulted in a rather remarkable transformation in our
balance sheet (not to mention some serious rocket fuel for Law.Gov!)

Meet the Scanners!

The International Amateur Scanning League is off to a roaring start, newly equipped with official Government ID badges and starting to rip. I'm pleased to report that things are going swimmingly, and volunteers have successfully ripped the first 42 DVDs. Procedures have been worked out for volunteers to sign up for times on a spreadsheet, get a large number of blanks from the National Archives staff, and leave their completed DVDs at the reference desk to be sent back to Public.Resource on a weekly basis. We were also pleased to learn that there are currently over 3,000 DVDs at the College Park facility, more than twice the number we had expected.

International Amateur Scanning League

The International Amateur Scanning League is an experiment in crowd-sourced digitization with a goal of making more broadly available 1,500 DVDs from the National Archives and Records Administration.

A National Scan Center: A Public Works Project

A small fraction of our stimulus package in the United States should be invested in a National Scan Center, a 5-year effort to scan paper, microfiche, audio, video, and other works across the government, with a particular focus in reducing the digitization backlog faced by agencies such as the National Archives.

Robots.Txt and the .Gov TLD

I’m on the board of CommonCrawl.Org, a nonprofit corporation that is attempting to provide a web crawl for use by all. An interesting report just got sent to us about the use of robots.txt files within the .Gov Top Level Domain, a standard known as the Robots Exclusion Standard. In examining about 32,000 subdomains in .gov, it turns at least 1,188 of these have a robots.txt file with a “global disallow,” meaning robots are excluded from indexing this content. Even more curious, on 175 of these sites, while there is a global disallow, there is a specific bypass that allows the Googlebot to index the data.

Unlikely Group Working Happily Together To Solve Patent Problem

People following the issue of open sourcing the U.S. Patent Database might have been surprised to read an announcement in the official business opportunities web site of the U.S. Government: Synopsis for Public Data Dissemination Sole Source Contract to Google, Inc. While the first reaction of many might be “OMG, WTF, how could they,” this is actually good news, with an unlikely cast of characters working together including Google, Intellectual Ventures, and the Internet Archive.