If I Wrote Fiction Like This Nobody Would Believe It

According to Mike Masnick at Techdirt, Mother Jones has discovered a hilarious goof. A document that the ACLU has been trying to pry loose (and could only get a heavily redacted version of) was left in the open at the Library of Congress because someone at the FBI tried to register it for copyright. Yes, really.

As Masnick points out this is at least three kinds of error: you can't copyright government documents; individuals don't own the documents produced by institutions (including the government); and the entire purpose of putting a copy of a document with the LoC is to make it available to the public.