'Can't copyright copyright': Feds need to kill $86K database charges—to help the public domain

Wouldn’t it be great if Marybeth Peters, head of the U.S. Copyright Office, read e-books so she could understand the tech better? Perhaps she’d then attempt to get them freed from the current DMCA restrictions on backups and conversions of works inDRMed formats.

Alas, that’s not the only problem that this self-confessed Luddite has with digitized text. Note the item excerpted below from our friends at if:book:

The $86K subscription

“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).”

Multiply number of serials available in PD

Why isn’t the above already free, or at least much less expensive? Imagine how the public domain community could use its own databases to help multiply the number of modern journals, magazines and other publications in the public domain.

You can’t reproduce them unless you have records to show the material is unencumbered (in some cases that would mean searches of records involving article authors, too).

Here’s more from the O’Reilly blog:

1. “The Copyright Office maintains a web-based application that allows the public to search for individual records. However, no bulk access is available: one cannot download the entire database.
2. “The Cataloging and Distribution Service of the Library of Congress sells a current subscription for $31,500 and makes the retrospective database available for $55,125 for a total cost of entry of $86,625. The Library of Congress Terms of Use assert copyright on this data.”

Nothing like copyrighting copyright, eh?