Happy Public Domain day
Happy Public Domain Day 2010!
There is a wealth of activities enabled by a robust public domain. It's important to celebrate it's presence and understand how and why it needs our support e.g. through organisations such as Creative Commons and others.
One example of why the Public domain matters is in relation to Open Government. The Centre for the Study of the Public Domain outlines why all works of the federal government are available as part of the public domain:
Under the Copyright Act of 1976, all works of the federal government are part of the public domain. This includes legislation, regulations, legal opinions, hearings, and all sorts of other information about how our government operates and what it produces. Efforts are currently underway to make all of this information searchable and accessible online. For example, the organization public.resource.org is designing a repository for all primary legal materials of the United States. Among other things, this includes court decisions previously accessible only through the “rich man’s Google” of “high-priced commercial services such as Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis.”
One of the goals of the online repository for legal materials is to supplant the government’s PACERwebsite, which charges for access to federal court filings. Carl Malamud, the president and founder of Public.Resource.Org, thinks the government can do much more to make public information public. Scroll to the end of his address, “We the People,” to find a list of “20 Things Government Could Do Today.”
For more on government "By the People" check Carl Malamud's session at the recent Gov 2.0 summit.
For more info, check http://publicdomainday.org and Creative Commons
