Carl Malamud is a technologist, author, and public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

 advocate, currently known for his foundation public.resource.org

Public.Resource.Org

Public.Resource.Org is a 501 non-profit corporation dedicated to publishing and sharing public domain materials in the United States. It was founded by Carl Malamud and is based out of Sebastopol, California. Their motto is “Making Government Information More Accessible”...

. He was the founder of the Internet Multicasting Service. During his time with this group, he was responsible for creating the first Internet radio

Internet radio

Internet radio is an audio service transmitted via the Internet...

 station, for putting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR

EDGAR

EDGAR, the Electronic Data-Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system, performs automated collection, validation, indexing, acceptance, and forwarding of submissions by companies and others who are required by law to file forms with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission...

 database on-line, and for creating the Internet 1996 World Exposition

Internet 1996 World Exposition

The Internet 1996 World Exposition web site, distributed on 8 servers around the world in a "public park for the global village," received 5 million visitors from 130 countries. In-kind contributions from sponsors included the first DS3 over the Pacific Ocean and 2 terabytes of disk...

.

Malamud is the author of eight books, including Exploring the Internet and A World's Fair.
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

Center for American Progress

The Center for American Progress is a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization. Its website states that the organization is "dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through progressive ideas and action." It has its headquarters in Washington D.C.Its President and Chief...

, and was a board member of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation

Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...

.

Protecting the public domain

Most recently, Malamud has set up the nonprofit public.resource.org, headquartered in Sebastopol, California

Sebastopol, California

Sebastopol is a city in Sonoma County, California, United States, approximately north of San Francisco. The population was 7,379 at the 2010 census, but its businesses also serve surrounding rural portions of Sonoma County, totaling about 50,000 people...

, to work for the publication of public domain information from local, state, and federal government agencies. Among his achievements have been digitizing 588 government films for the Internet Archive and YouTube, publishing a 5 million page crawl of the Government Printing Office, and persuading the state of Oregon to not assert copyright over its legislative statutes. He has also been active in challenging the state of California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

's copyright claims on state laws by publishing copies of the criminal, building, and plumbing codes online.

He has also challenged the information management policy of Smithsonian Networks, convinced C-SPAN

C-SPAN

C-SPAN , an acronym for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, is an American cable television network that offers coverage of federal government proceedings and other public affairs programming via its three television channels , one radio station and a group of websites that provide streaming...

 to liberalize their video archive access policy, and begun publishing court decisions. 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. He is currently 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.

External links

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