The indefatigable Carl Malamud of public.resource.org today sent out a public interest letter to the U.S. Copyright Office demanding that they provide bulk access over the Internet to the catalog of copyrighted monographs, documents and serials, a resource which to date has been accessible in full only through costly subscriptions and access fees to the tune of $86,625 (currently it’s available for free only by individual record queries).

The copyright catalog of monographs, documents, and serials is not a product, it is fuel that makes the copyright system work. Anybody should be able to download the entire database to their desktop, write a better search application, or use this public domain information to research copyright questions.

It also makes the point that under U.S. copyright law, government publications are supposed to be automatically in the public domain, which makes this Library of Congress-sponsored priced access racket particularly hard to swallow. Read the full letter (co-signed by a good group including Peter Brantley and Rick Prelinger) here.
(via O’Reilly.)