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 communique and maybe flame would be more accurate. I basically accused the entire of agency of falling down on the job.

So imagine my surprise the next day when my phone rang and the voice on the other end said "Mr. Malamud, this is Ellen Herbst. I'm director of the National Technical Information Service."

Oh-oh, I thought, here it comes.

Well, Ms. Herbst turned out to be perfectly reasonable. She wanted the video out there, but by law they were required to recover their costs and by the time you added up the people to run the service and factored in the almost nonexistent sales, well, it cost $70 to sell you a videotape.

If they had to recover their costs, what if we didn't cost them anything?

"Can you just loan us your videotapes?" I asked the Director. "You know, send us the tapes, we make a copy, we send them back to you? We can even pay the postage!"

A long pause. "Yes, I suppose we could do that."

And thus was born FedFlix, where government loans us tapes which we digitize and send back to them, with a DVD included for each videotape.

Rule 5 is pretty simple. Keep asking—keep rephrasing the question until they can say yes.

In November 2007, a couple months after that phone call—lighteninglightning [sic] fast by government standards—we signed a joint venture agreement in which every month NTIS would send 20 tapes.

We ran that program for a year and put a couple hundred tapes on-line. At the end of the year, we renewed