Carl Malamud speaking at the UC Berkeley iSchool about "(Re-)defining the public domain", October 17, 2007.

Carl Malamud (born 1959) is a technologist, author, and public domain advocate, known for his foundation public.resource.org. He was the founder of the Internet Multicasting Service. During his time with this group, he was responsible for creating the first Internet radio station,^[1] for putting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database on-line,^[2] and for creating the Internet 1996 World Exposition.^[3]

Malamud is the author of eight books, including Exploring the Internet and A World's Fair.^[4][5] He was a visiting professor at the MIT Media Laboratory and was the former chairman of the Internet Software Consortium. He also was the co-founder of Invisible Worlds, was a fellow at the Center for American Progress, and was a board member of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.^[6][7]

Protecting the public domain

Malamud set up the nonprofit public.resource.org, headquartered in Sebastopol, California, to work for the publication of public domain information from local, state, and federal government agencies.^[8] Among his achievements have been digitizing 588 government films for the Internet Archive and YouTube,^[9] publishing a 5 million page crawl of the Government Printing Office,^[10] and persuading the state of Oregon to not assert copyright over its legislative statutes.^[11] He has also been active in challenging the state of California's copyright claims on state laws by publishing copies of the criminal, building, and plumbing codes online.^[12]

He has also challenged the information management policy of Smithsonian Networks, convinced C-SPAN to liberalize its video archive access policy, and begun publishing court decisions.^{[13][14][15][16][17]} In 2009 he proposed himself, through the "Yes We Scan" campaign, as the Public Printer of the U.S., the head of the Government Printing Office.^[18] He is leading an effort, under the banner of Law.gov, to bring online all primary legal materials (including legal codes and case law) for open public access.

An early Internet pioneer, he is the author of many early books about networking such as Analyzing Novell Networks and DEC Networks and Architectures.^[19][20]

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Carl Malamud

• public.resource.org
• "Dear Secretary Small" Open letter by Malamud to the Smithsonian Institution over its access policies