Slashdot Mirror
U.S. to Digitize All Tangible Gov't. Publications
CETS writes "The U.S. Government Printing Office is working with the library community on a national digitization plan, with the goal of digitizing a complete legacy collection of tangible U.S. Government publications. The objective is to ensure that the digital collection is available, in the public domain, for no-fee permanent public access through the FDLP. See specific article for more detail."
When will they completely digitize the Library of Congress?
No doubt this is also seen by certain parties as an opportunity to blank out certain unpleasant incidents in our history.
Having a collective base of all government documents online is indeed a noble goal , perhaps consideration could be made to include digitalisation of all Literary works which have fallen into the public domain.
Marilyn vos Savant (I believe it was Von Savant)wrote about the entire collection of the worlds literature being contained on just 2 discs , it would be nice to think that we are one step closer to having something of that ilk easily accessible even if it is just for government records at the moments.
Hopefully within the next 50 years we shall see actually see paper go the way of the Dodo and which would certainly be rather grand from an ecological stand point considering how expensive printed publishing can be (storage space , ecological impact , and ink)
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
When can we expect to see the intangible publications?
1. digitize it!
2. offer it at no cost
3. ?????
4. profit!!
as long as the government doesn't subject 99% of the documents to classified status, I think that it's quite a noble goal.
Have other governments around the world done this?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Too bad many of them have been reclassified in order to keep people ignorant, er, I mean, protect us from terrorists.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Will the post office bother continuing to service Pueblo, Colorado?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Is Slashdot a Government Publication?
Woah, close one.
Will the US government choose an open standard to allow everyone access to the documents? Or will we have to put up with bloated .docs?
Like to see the electrical code, fire code, building codes digitized and made available to the public instead of forcing citizens to purchase the law or take a ride to the library or county clerk to find out what the law is.
Note to any county/state workers out there. Stop adopting the above codes by reference. Print the codes into your public documents so they can't be copyrighted and withheld/sold to the public.
Being forced to spend $70+ per code may work for electricians making $100+ per hour, but it doesn't work for the rest of the citizens. Ignorance of the law is no excuse? How about lack of listing the law on your county/state websites in a printable format is no excuse either?
ASME or whatever the mechanic's organization was doing this also. Thankfully the company hired to put together the standards GPL'd them. The ruckus this created when the mechanic's organization found out (court case) they couldn't force their own mechanics to buy standards instead of copying them, someone should find this and post the link here. Its a very enlightening read. The mechanics organization forcing their own membership to buy standards. They represent the mechanics. They speak for them. And the organization turns around and hits them in the head so they can generate a slush fund for their headquarters.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I saw a movie on cable about the future, ALL knowledge was stored on a single computer in Belgium. There were no more printed materials, it was evil to kill trees and the computer made knowledge available, at will.
The guy had to look up something about some shady government plot and as he began to dig into the computer banks, he began to notice big holes in history, big holes in time. The computer was deleting records to cover up crimes committed by big shots at the top.
The more he dug in, the more things vaporized.
And being it was the sole repository of knowledge in the universe, well, that was that..
The name of the computer? Yep. You guessed it.
The Beast.
I can not for the life of me remember what that movie was named and I've never seen it again since the early 80's.. Did it self-terminate also??
IMO, I would much rather have printed books in my hand, I can pick up a book and find something in seconds, I can spend endless hours trying to find something on the computer. Besides, reading from a screen is just not a very pleasant experience, compared to a book in hand.
...smelly and useless.
Well, it is possible that this idea would actually result in a digital collection of documents that were usable, but if it goes the way I've noted too many other digitisation efforts seem to go, then the result will be a stack of PDF documents that are no more than scanned images of pages with no OCR, thus no actual use.
Of course it is possible that some bright spark will come along and run an OCR process over the standard scans that many document scanning systems seem to produce.
From a PHB perspective, a PDF is universal, never mind the difference between an image and text which might actually make the collection useful.
|>>?
One thing that should be a concern with this project is to make sure that plenty of paper documents still do exist. It may be very hard for future historians to work with our electronic data, and if everything the government does is eventually entirely digitized. Who knows if in 300 years someone will be able to open a .pdf or .doc file?
-- ac at home
at LOGSA are great if one messes around with military surplus electronics. There are other sections with manuals for vehicles and aircraft.
to digitize their documents, when they are so busy removing, reclassifying, and denying access to current government information.
'nuff said.
The U.S. Government Printing Office is working with the library community on a national digitization plan, with the goal of digitizing a complete legacy collection of tangible U.S. Government publications. The objective is to ensure that the digital collection is available, in the public domain, for no-fee permanent public access through the FDLP.
Unless of course any of that information would be useful in questioning the current Presidential administration's actions, pointing out where they are wrong, or alerting citizens about the potential dangers that are around them (faulty power facilities, insecure water factilities, etc). that information only helps the terrorists, so that "permanent public access" idea conveniently will be shuffled aside.
We should ammend copyright to last a maximum of 7 years
That would require the United States to drop out of the Berne Convention, which mandates a copyright term of at least life plus 50 years. Given that only Berne parties may remain in the World Trade Organization, watch the value of the United States dollar drop even more than it already has.
I can see how a federal judge might rule that repealing even the Bono Act might not be constitutional: "The Congress shall have Power ... to secure ... exclusive Rights", not to un-secure them. Rolling back copyprivilege terms of an existing work might violate the takings clause of the fifth article of amendment.
If you'd like to help Project Gutenberg's effort to digitise the public domain, then join our Distributed Proofreading site and get to work!
What happens in a few decades once DP has digitized all "important" English literary works first published on or before 1922?
Well, if all these documents are digitized, and, as my cousin the high end Lawyer tells it "PDF is the only way to go for documents as changes are constantly / continuously tracked"
Then ADOBE can start charging for it's reader:
"Aw shucks Martha in order to read our water bill we gotta SUBSCRIBE to ADOBE Reader"
Where's my broker's number? Crap - I let the phone subscription expire.
Why is the Sig usually the most interesting part of the comment?
that how you end up with $400 screwdrivers and $3,000 airplane toilet seats.
:-) and would rather NOT believe that it was for something that the government doesn't want you to know about... Well believe what you want.
Whoever assigned the line item names screwed up and the quantity/amounts for those line items didn't take into account that cost over runs would leave the line item exposed.
If YOU want to believe it was actually $3,000 for a toilet seat and that our government is run by idiots (well maybe
The explanation may be perfectly reasonable and a decision for strategic reasons (you don't want the world to know just how much money the gummint is spending on North Korean espionnage now do you? One person will bitch tha its too much while another will bitch that its too little, and who needs that?)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
who pays for all the time and materials required to produce a code?
The same people who pay for all the time and materials required to produce any other piece of legislation. The taxpayers bought the code, and they should have the right to read and copy it.
The book was the sequel to "Colossus: The Forbin Project"
The original was made into a movie. The sequel wasn't.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Yeah! This will be great. During the 60's-70's Nasa paid for these GREAT research notes on topics like, skin tight space suits, atomic rocket engines, stuff that should get revisited. Can't wait.. . . http://www.threatchaos.com/
Which coincidentally is the penalty that the **AA wants for copyright violators.
Now how about they open up all of those government databases that you now need Lexis/Nexis to search? How about they finally create a site that lets me search what my tax dollars pay for in the first place?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
So much easier to purge inconvenient digital records by pushing a button or letting a cronjob run, than to shred all that paper. OTOH, a law requiring the Feds to stash all digital records in redundant "backups", encrypted, but with loggable key escrow protected by due process, would give us the best of both worlds: convenient records, inconveniently preservable for accountability. If they committed all the data to plaintext, on self-contained (solar powered) players, recorded on metal tapes like airplane black boxes, stored in old nuclear missile silos, we'd have the kind of records system worthy of a 21st Century government of, by, and for the people.
--
make install -not war
....if the 95% of state government information that I needed was online. So, who wants to volunteer to scan the millions of deeds in the county court house?
I hear there was a federal court decision on this not long ago. (I may have seen it here on Slashdot.) As I recall:
Somebody put up a web site with the full text of the electrical code (as adopted by a local jurisdiction, which included the whole thing by reference). Code publishing organization sued. Ruling was to the effect of:
- The standards document itself is copyright, but
- The code as adopted (including the expansion of references into the full text itself) was law and as such not subject to copyright claims, so
- The code as adopted, even if it includes the full text of the standards document verbatim, is public domain, and
- The standards organization, by proposing the standard to be adopted into law, agreed to this (even if they obviously didn't intend to, as evidenced by their business model and suit), and thus
- Publishing the code as adopted by some US jurisdication - correctly annotated as such - does not violate the copyright on the standard (even if it includes the whole text of the standard).
Can't dig for it now, but perhaps somebody has a reference?
(Meanwhile, IANAL and my memory isn't perfect, so don't go publishing a code document without doing your own checking. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
By the way:
Note that this does NOT apply to standards unless they have been first proposed as legislation by the standards organization holding the copyright and then adopted as law by some US jurisdiction.
So if you go publishing your favorite ANSI, IEEE, ITU, or whatever standard without BOTH of those criteria being met you'll be breaking new legal ground. Expect to pay some very expensive lawyers to wield the shovels and picks for you when the standards committee in question comes after you.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
According to the state of Massachusetts, proprietary or encumbered Microsoft Office formats are "open formats". Massachusetts state law is not federal law, but you can see how a lack of deep understanding and resolve to demand something better from business ends up hurting the public interest. Here's hoping that federally this receives more citizen-oriented thought. This is a political problem that will require ongoing political pressure to resolve in favor of the citizenry.
Digital Citizen
Are bank notes "government publications"?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
...by some private contractor crony of the Bush administration and/or powerful members of Congress. Who will it be? Lexis-Nexis?
it's all his fault!!!111 this a good example of the failure this administration has been
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
You must be referring to Veeck vs. SBCCI, wherein a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision held that "the law" is in the public domain, including such portions of a model code as are incorporated by reference. (The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari.) Note that the model codes still retain their copyright as model codes, but once incorporated into "the law" (even by reference), the incorporated portions are in the public domain as "the law" of that jurisdiction. (I am not a lawyer, but I did read the full text of the decision.)
It's significant to note that this was an en banc review of the case, and the earlier 3-judge panel had come to the opposite conclusion, upholding the copyright. Be thankful that the full appeals court reached the correct public policy conclusion!
Note that the important point was that the model codes had been adopted as law, not the fact that SBCCI had encouraged such adoption. The latter fact was what kept it from being a "takings" case. As I read the decision, the incorporated model codes would have still become public domain as "the law", even if incorporated by reference without permission, but SBCCI presumably would have had grounds to sue the government for damages in a "takings" case, for the impact on the value of their copyright...
It's also important to note that this case does not place standards referenced by "the law" into the public domain. It specifically distinguishes such cases from this one, where a model code was written for the express purpose of being enacted into law.
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Is there some kind of automated mechanism to digitize books and magazines without a ton of manual effort? I used a flatbed scanner to scan quite a few magazines, and while this worked excellently in terms of the output, I have far more printed material than I would ever have time to digitize in this manner.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
IIRC, US federal law guarantees you the right to make archival copies of every digital thing you purchase.
It did until October 1998, when the 105th U.S. Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.[1] Under 17 USC 1201, enacted as part of the DMCA, the copyright owner has the right to prohibit the making and/or use of even "fair" copies made pursuant to 17 USC 117 if such use requires circumvention of CD-ROM/CD-R detection or any other technological measure.
Or that telling the medium of the CD-ROM requires a more direct interface to the drive than Windows or Mac allow
A lot of programs' installers require administrator privileges, and a driver installed by a administrator can make all the ioctl() calls it wants (or the equivalent under other operating systems).
and guarantees that your software won't be worth anything when the next OS version or drive system comes along.
<sarcasm>The software isn't supposed to be worth anything; you're supposed to buy another copy.</sarcasm>
[1]I say "Congress passed" because though President Clinton signed it, there was a clear enough bipartisan supermajority in each house to override any threat of a veto.
And even if you never read down to 1201(c)(1)*, 1201(a)(1)(A) uses the verb CIRCUMVENT. A bit-for-bit copy doesn't circumvent any effective control.
A bit-for-bit copy would not run, as it would still include the code to check whether a pressed CD-ROM is present. In this case you need to apply a no-CD crack. The act of applying the crack is circumvention, and the no-CD crack software is a circumvention device. Circumvention without the consent of the Register of Copyrights is a crime, and making a circumvention device in the United States or importing one (by downloading it from a foreign server) is a crime.
17 US 1201(c)(1) reads, exactly, "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title [17 U.S.C.A. S 1 et seq.]." If it's fair use, the DMCA doesn't apply.
This paragraph has actually had the opposite effect in practice. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Universal v. Reimerdes upheld an interpretation of (c)(1) to mean that defenses to copyright infringement are not defenses to circumvention. Unless you can create a split among the appeals circuits, you're out of luck.
But WinXP shouts when someone tries to install a driver
It doesn't shout nearly as loudly when the vendor of copy prevention software (such as Macrovision) is large enough to afford the WHQL process.
and installing custom drivers to read documents from a perfectly working drive is a great way to grant a legal right for a user to crack your CD, archival rights notwithstanding.
Under what legal theory?