Intellectual Property Law

On Locked Up and "Owned" Government Information

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

Reasearch Librarian extraordinare Raizel Liebler of the John Marshall Law School compiled a terrific post that provides background, commentray and links with egregious examples of a private companies locking up public domain materials created by government agencies. She notes:

... For example, the OpenCRS project (and others) attempt to make available Congressional Research Service Reports that as a whole are only available from commercial vendors ( Penny Hill Press, LexisNexis, and CRS documents). We the taxpayers are spending over $100 million a year on the production of these reports by government employees ? yet we do not have comprehensive access without paying. The House bill introduced to open these reports to the public, H.R. 2545, has had no action since the date of introduction.

Think about how this bizarre situation has turned public domain on its head ? a government employee has created public domain documents, a company has acquired them, and the public now needs to go through that company to see those documents. And if you are a subscriber who has paid for access and then you attempt to download all of those public domain documents to make them publicly available ? look out! If you do this, you?ve likely violated your contract / license with the company to access those public domain documents, even though those public domain documents have no copyright protection. The commercial vendor considers the license to trump public domain status. ...

Read her entire post here.

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on June 04, 2008 (boomark / email).