Here's a story via the blog BoingBoing about some recent moves to electronically publish our country's legislative history. Publisher Thomson West received loads of help from Government Accountability Office law librarians (publicly funded) in compiling and scanning this information. A portion of those documents are being made available free of charge. But Thomson now says it owns the exclusive rights to these documents, as it's the "publisher."
It's a tricky situation we're likely to see more of in coming years. Typically, government documents are freely available to citizens. They have already been paid for through tax dollars, after all. When publishers come onto the scene, though, they have a financial stake in keeping this information out of public hands. They want people to use their, usually extremely expensive, databases or services to access what was once public domain.
So there's a bit of a dilemma. Is it better to have electronic, but expensive, access to these documents? Or is it better to keep public information freely available to the public, even if that public needs to track down documents the old-fashioned way in D.C.?
It's a tricky situation we're likely to see more of in coming years. Typically, government documents are freely available to citizens. They have already been paid for through tax dollars, after all. When publishers come onto the scene, though, they have a financial stake in keeping this information out of public hands. They want people to use their, usually extremely expensive, databases or services to access what was once public domain.
So there's a bit of a dilemma. Is it better to have electronic, but expensive, access to these documents? Or is it better to keep public information freely available to the public, even if that public needs to track down documents the old-fashioned way in D.C.?
No comments:
Post a Comment