7 Tales of Bureaucracy
volunteers who reached certain milestones. If you copy 5 DVDs you get a John F. Kennedy Public Domain Merit Badge, at 25 discs you get the Bob Hope, and for 50 you get the Duke Ellington.
—Bureaucracy № 5—
Video is really just a hobby for me, something I do in my spare time. I run a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and we get our money in the form of grants from foundations such as the Omidyar Network and corporations such as Google and Justia. We also get contributions from private foundations such as the Elbaz, Kapor, and O'Reilly foundations.
Foundations aren't going to give you much money if your mission statement is "we upload government videotapes to YouTube."
My day job, as it were, the stuff we're paid to do in the form of grants and contributions, is to help change our legal system by making the law more freely available.
You'll remember that with government video, at the federal level, there is no copyright in works of government. This principle that there is no copyright is even more sacred for a protected core—the law. The principle that we're a nation of laws not a nation of men means that we write down the rules that citizens must obey. How can we be a nation of laws if those rules are not open source?
Despite this principle, access to legal materials in the United States is a $10 billion per year business. Often, government will erect barriers to access as a way of extracting rent from the public.
