Carl Malamud's Box of Goodies - On The Media

Use the link above to access Alex Goldman’s interview of Carl Malamud on the program “On the Media.” An overview of the program reads as follows: “This week on the show, we're talking with Carl Malamud, open government advocate and director of public.resource.org. Malamud's interested in what are called ‘incorporation by reference.’ The phrase describes laws that have references to safety standards embedded in them. For instance, a law that says your car has to have turning signals will also include standards about how bright or how large the turn signals have to be. Malamud's gripe is that frequently, those standards are written by private companies, and those companies hold the copyright to the standards. That means that even though the standards are part of a law everyone has to follow, citizens have to pay -- sometimes several hundreds of dollars -- for the privilege of looking at them. So Malamud's come up with a simple, albeit expensive solution. He spent over $7,000 to purchase 73 public safety standards that have been incorporated by reference into law. Then he printed them out, and recently, he's been shipping the documents (which weigh thirty pounds, all-in) to various governmental agencies and standards development organizations. He plans to publish the documents online for the public soon, but he's giving the various agencies and organizations until May 1st to comment on his plan. If it doesn't become a copyright lawsuit, Malamud plans to start publishing these standards to the web regularly. You can listen to the segment from the show on the embedded player below...”