Page:Code Swaraj - Carl Malamud - Sam Pitroda.djvu/133

Note on Code Swaraj better system that would make all central acts and subordinate legislation available on a central portal. The order stated that legislation should be made available as “machine readable PDF format,” which presumably means one could extract the text from the PDF file and use it for big data analysis, transformation to HTML, better metadata, and other uses. It is clear that this area will receive significant attention in 2018 and beyond.

Why I Was Neglecting Works of Government

I was spending my days scanning Gandhi, maintaining my archive of 6,000 U.S. government films, looking at official gazettes. But, none of these things was what I was supposed to be doing. What I was supposed to be doing instead was publishing the results of my research into Works of the U.S. Government.

In the U.S., as with most national copyright systems, there is a list of things that may not be copyrighted. In the U.S., one of the most notable of those exceptions is works of the U.S. government, which are works authored by U.S. federal employees or officers in the course of their official duties. The idea behind this exception is that the employee is a servant of the people, the people have paid the servant a salary, and the resulting work product thus belongs to their employer, the people. It is a simple, yet powerful concept.

Works of government are why, when the government was selling the Patent and Securities and Exchange databases for high prices as a revenue source in the early 1990s, I was able to liberate those databases. The databases cost several hundred thousand dollars per year to purchase, but if I could raise the money, I was clear. Once I had the data, there was no copyright, and I was thus allowed to post the database on the Internet.

Ironically enough, the way I purchased these government documents from the U.S. government in order to give them away to the people of the U.S. was to apply for a grant from another part of the government, the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF was instrumental in the growth of the Internet during that period and Stephen Wolff, the division director, was a brave man to give me that grant.

When the news broke about this new project, Chairman Dingell of the powerful House Energy Committee sent an outraged letter to the National Science Foundation asking why they were “competing” with the private sector by giving away this information. It was only after Vice President Gore was quoted in the