Public Information for All: An Interview with Carl Malamud

Since the early 1990s, Carl Malamud has made it his business to return to the public what is rightfully theirs: free access to public information. Despite legislation that mandates such access to government information, some categories of information have been excluded, notable among them court opinions (with the exception of the U.S. Supreme Court) and state laws. Working most recently through his foundation, Public.Resource.org, Malamud is spearheading several initiatives to digitize or otherwise make government information available. Some of his most recent initiatives include digitizing government videos available from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) and National Archives (NARA) and making them available through the Internet Archive and YouTube, freeing fee-based court decisions available from PACER (Paper Access to Court Electronic Records), and bringing Oregon State information into the public domain. In this interview, Malamud discusses some of these initiatives, as well as barriers to access, trends in copyright, potential legal fixes, and where libraries fit into the puzzle.