Carl Malamud

“ Build up a user base, and you have much more leverage than if you're just blowing smoke.
Perhaps we should have used our "first-mover advantage" to—as they said in the .com days—"monetize the eyeballs." But, I didn't want to be the face of the SEC, I wanted the SEC to do their job, which was to make the EDGAR database available to the public, on the Internet, for free, and in an at least moderately clueful manner. ”

“ Turning primary legal materials from public property into private parcels violates more than equal protection, it makes due process under the law impossible, when rich lawyers can do more research than poor lawyers. ”

“ Here is my seventh rule for radicals, which is to get standing. One can criticize government all one wants, and they'll often ignore you. But, if there is something clearly wrong and against the law and you can document that malfeasance and wrongdoing, they have to talk to you. If you have standing, you can insist.
—Bureaucracy No 6—
There is a related rule, and that is rule 8, which is to try to get the bureaucrats to threaten you. Remember how the law has a special place when it comes to copyright? ”

“ For agencies in the information business, such as the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and many others, the dual challenges of dealing with legacy formats and how to face a digital future have been overwhelming. In many cases, the agencies have turned to what they call public-private partnerships, so-called "no cost to the government" deals that have proven to be especially troublesome. ”

“ So, we hired a lawyer and put together a draft declaratory relief request and posted it on the net.
The thing about a state sending you a takedown notice for putting the law on the Internet is that this is not one of the subtle legal issues that you have to carefully explain to people. Everybody gets this—you can walk into any bar and explain what's going on and everybody will instantly get the issue and say "that's really stupid."
And that's my rule 9 for radicals—look for over-reaching, something that is clearly nuts. ”

“ While this loose-knit band of anarchists that were defining an Internet based on open standards were free to ignore most of the nonsense coming out of the "standards professionals" and their "Open Systems Interconnection" effort—there was one thing we couldn't ignore and that was the telephone network on which we built our unreliable, best-effort datagram service. ”

“ Video is really just a hobby for me, something I do in my spare time. I run a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit and we get our money in the form of grants from foundations such as the Omidyar Network and corporations such as Google and Justia. We also get contributions from private foundations such as the Elbaz, Kapor, and O'Reilly foundations.
Foundations aren't going to give you much money if your mission statement is "we upload government videotapes to YouTube." ”

“ Having presented to you my credentials as a pundit, I would like to talk to you today about some bureaucracies I've had occasion to encounter, and some lessons I have learned about how citizens—citizens with no official portfolio or status—"mere" citizens if you will—how citizens can change the way government works.
I hope these tales are more than mere war stories, I hope to leave you today with some rules for radicals, 10 rules to apply to governing institutions as we attempt to change their behavior. ”

“ Rule 4 is that when you achieve your objective, don't be afraid to turn on a dime and be nice. You can bang the table and be a total pain in the ass, but there comes a time to be helpful, courteous, and friendly.
—Bureaucracy No 3—
For the next bureaucracy, let's fast-forward this Wayback Machine to late 2006 and early 2007—when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, when C-SPAN started allowing you to use their video of congress on your blog, the year Netflix started streaming videos—the year "you" were named Time Man of the Year. This is when video came to the Internet. ”

“ You see, the Courts, under strong congressional pressure to do something about public access, had just launched a trial program, putting one terminal in each of 17 libraries around the country. In the FAQ for the PACER recycling site, I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Corps and download docs from the public access libraries and upload them to the PACER recycling site.
Aaron Swartz, whom many of you may know as the editor of the RSS spec and a prolific contributor to the Internet, called up and said he'd like to join the Thumb Drive Corps. ”

“ Perhaps the most subversive thing we do with this video is put the masters on our server for FTP and rsync. The hardest part of making a film or a news piece today is clearing the rights in that absurd thicket of copyright-obsessed stock footage libraries. With our multi-terabyte public domain stock footage library, you don't have to ask, and there are never any late charges in the public domain. ”

“ In 1993, I had graduated from print to the wonderful world of multimedia, which meant mostly 8-bit GIF files. The blinky tag had not even been invented yet.
Most of us running network ops were using FTP, email, and perhaps gopher and Archie. With those tools, I was running an Internet radio station called Internet Talk Radio. The flagship program was Geek of the Week, which most people retrieved by launching an overnight FTP job and then—assuming the sound card was properly installed—listened to the sound file on their workstations. ”

“ But what if we spread the pain out? What if other people bought some of these tapes and donated them to the public domain? For $29.95 a month, I signed up for EBay's ProStores, one of those anybody-can-build-a-store ecommerce solutions, and built a front-end proxy on top of the NTIS store. The deal was we'd take your money, order the tape, upload it to the Internet Archive and YouTube, and you'd get a tax deduction.
In a fit of marketing, we festooned the site with slogans: "Be the last person to buy this fine video" and "Buy from us and you get nothing but everybody gets something." ”

“ When the starting gun goes off, run really fast. As a small player, the elephant can step on you, but you can outrun the elephant.
Rule 3: Eyeballs rule. If a million people use your service, and on the Internet you can do that, you've got a lot more credibility than if you're just issuing position papers and flaming the man. ”

“ Our strategy to get this basic principle—that access to primary legal materials must be unfettered and reliable, must be available in bulk, and cannot be subject to pay walls or copyright restrictions—has started with a national conversation, a series of working groups and workshops held in many of the top law schools in the country. ”

“ Turns out the new tenants over at the White House were having trouble getting their routers cleared by the Secret Service and they wanted to do a "we know what the Internet" is event with the President, so ARPA helped us run an infra-red link from the roof of the National Press Building down to the White House lawn to get them hooked up.
About ninety days after the NSF grant came through, the server was up and running and raw EDGAR data was on the net. Remember rule 2, when the starter's pistol gets fired, run as fast as you can. ”

“ This year, people involved in the free law movement have been gathering together under the banner of the Law.Gov initiative, an effort to try and convince policy makers from water districts to the President and Chief Justice that access to primary legal materials matters. ”

“ So, I forked over $251 and bought 20 DVDs from Amazon and posted them in all the usual places. Some great stuff, like footage of Richard Nixon in the White House, explaining why he was innocent of any wrongdoing.
Then, I wrote to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing and he posted a note telling all the happy mutants that if they watched Richard Nixon on YouTube, they could help save the public domain because we were counting all the views to show members of Congress that people really care about this stuff. ”

“ This is a big business for the courts: they drag in $120 million a year in revenue. The courts even charge the executive branch of the federal government millions a year to access filings!
To poke a few fingers in the eyes of the Administrative Office, we put up a recycling site, which let people upload their PDF documents from PACER—where we'd recycle them into the public domain. ”

“ The Commissioner evidently briefed the Chairman, because that evening Chairman Levitt called the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal and said the SEC was going to offer this EDGAR database on the Internet. The filings weren't a product, they were the glue that make our financial markets work efficiently by requiring corporations to disclose information to the public. ”

“ I forked over $336, ordered some tapes, and posted them to YouTube and the Internet Archive. "John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightening," from the U.S. Information Agency. "Firefighter Safety and Survival" from the U.S. Fire Academy, and "Day of the Killer Tornados" from FEMA.
The nice thing about the U.S. government is pretty much anything they produce is called a "Work of the Government" and that means, at the federal level, it is public domain. There are a couple of exceptions and grey areas, but the basic rule is no copyright.
Simple enough: buy video from the government and upload it. ”

“ These EDGAR filings were used by stock brokers, economists, and analysts, and a $300 million/year industry had sprung up retailing these documents. When I was a doctoral student in economics, I learned that sometimes you could write to the corporation and ask them to send you their annual report by U.S. Mail, but often I ended up forking over $30 a document to some information retailer to read these filings electronically. ”

“ The letters said we had sent a preliminary audit to the Administrative Office and a final audit to the Administrative Office, and of course, these letters said, it goes without saying that the Administrative Office had promptly notified the judges of these very serious problems, since of course they didn't want to be breaking the law.
Needless to say, the judges hadn't heard about this situation, and you have to swallow real hard before you send Chief Judges of U.S. District Courts letters saying "Third and Final Notice," but you know what ... judges are reasonable people. ”

“ These institutions were based in Geneva and their work product was meant for grownups, grownups of sufficient means that the cost of a few thousand dollars to buy standards documents was considered not only eminently reasonable, but absolutely necessary to the functioning of our standards-making organizations. ”