Carl Malamud talk on Friday:

Should America’s Operating System Be Open Source?
Carl Malamud, President and Founder of Public.Resource.Org
Friday, October 23 at 11Am, Studio A, Knight Libraries
(Enter through STEM door on the RHS of the library).

Who owns the law? A thicket of copyright restrictions has arisen around the primary legal materials of the United States. Statutes, regulations, hearings, Attorney General Opinions, building codes, and the other materials that make up the raw materials of democracy all face restrictions. In this talk, Carl Malamud will look at the question of who owns the law, tracing the issues back to early Supreme Court decisions, looking at how the law of the law has been applied in the modern era, and will pay particular attention to a set of issues regarding ownership of the law in Oregon.

Carl Malamud is the President and Founder of Public.Resource.Org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has been instrumental in placing over 90 million pages of primary legal materials on the Internet. They were in the lead in the effort last year to convince the Oregon Legislative Committee to waive copyright on the Oregon Revised Statutes, and have been particularly at the federal level, conducting audits of PACER, helping the Government Printing Office publish the Federal Register in XML, and convincing C-SPAN to waive restrictions on use on their footage of government proceedings. Malamud was previously Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress, and prior to that created the Internet Multicasting Service – which ran the first radio station on the Internet, and put the SEC and U.S. Patent Office on the Internet.