Interview: ‘This Little USB Holds 19,000 Indian Standards. Why Should it Not Be Made Public?’
The Wire, Anuj Srivas, October 26, 2017 (Used With Permission)
An interview with Carl Malamud, founder of Public. Resource.Org, on his legal quest to make the codes and regulations notified by the Bureau of Indian Standards available to the public for free without any payment.
[Anuj Srinivas] Hello, and welcome to The Wire’s discussion today on making public information available to everyone. My name is Anuj Srinivas, and today our guest is Carl Malamud.
Carl has been described as everything from the Internet’s own instigator to America’s unofficial public printer. Carl’s mission, over the last 25 years, has been to use the Internet to make publicly accessible or available information more accessible and more available to everyone possible. Over the last ten years, a lot of his work has centered around legislation, legal code standards, and so on and so forth. More often than not, this brings him into confrontation with government authorities who would like to regulate or disseminate this information in a very selective manner.
Thank you, Carl, for joining us and being here today.
[Carl Malamud] My pleasure, my pleasure.
[Anuj Srinivas] For our viewers who are not familiar with your work, could you walk through what it is to make information that is supposed to be public, in a more public fashion, available to the people.
[Carl Malamud] Well, the information I deal with is information that most people agree should be public, but for some reason is not. It’s locked behind a pay wall because of inertia, or the government agency is not technically able to handle the problem, or somebody wants to be the vendor, wants to be exclusive. What I look for is large databases, like the US patent database. In that case, I bought all the data. The patent office was selling it. It took a few hundred thousand dollars, which I was able to raise. I bought it, I put it online, millions of people started to use it, and I went knocking on the patent office’s door and said, “You know what, this is your job. You should be doing it.”
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