Carl Malamud

In 2019 Malamud expressed a wish for the matter to advance to the Supreme Court for clarification, despite the appellate court ruling in his favor.

Fail. Fail often. And don’t forget, you can question authority.

On October 18, 2018, a federal appeals court decision struck down the State of Georgia's attempt to claim that its officially published statutes were protected by copyright due to the addition of annotations. Although the state's Code Revision Commission did not claim that the statutes themselves were copyrighted, they believed that their annotated work could only be distributed by the state's chosen commercial publisher, Lexis-Nexis.

In September 2015, Malamud published a petition to the Government of the United Kingdom, calling for it to make the safety standards published by the European Union for toy safety freely available, rather than allowing them to continue being only available at high cost and subject to restrictive terms of use.

At a 2013 memorial for Swartz, Malamud recalled their work with PACER. They brought millions of U.S. District Court records out from behind PACER's "pay wall", he said, and found them full of privacy violations, including medical records and the names of minor children and confidential informants.

In 2013, the State of Georgia sued Malamud for providing the Official Code of Georgia Annotated on his website, borrowing his own words to describe it as "a form of 'terrorism.'"

10 Rules for Radicals is Malamud's keynote at the 19th World Wide Web Consortium conference in April 2010. It's a slim and often humorous account of interaction with various bureaucracies and how to make public sector information more accessible.

He has also challenged the information management policy of Smithsonian Networks, convinced C-SPAN to liberalize its video archive access policy, and begun publishing court decisions. In 2009 he proposed himself, through the "Yes We Scan" campaign, as the Public Printer of the U.S., the head of the Government Printing Office. He is leading an effort, under the banner of Law.gov, to bring online all primary legal materials (including legal codes and case law) for open public access.

In 2009 Malamud announced his candidacy to become Public Printer of the United States and asked for the public to endorse him for the position. The role is filled by an appointment by the president and it is unusual that it would be the subject of a public campaign. Malamud sought the position on a platform of promising to "make all primary legal materials produced by the U.S. readily available" and to include "principles of bulk data distribution in legislation."

In 2009 Malamud received the EFF Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for being a public domain advocate.

Malamud authored eight books as of 2009, including Exploring the Internet and A World's Fair.

In 2008, Malamud announced that the federal court archive Public Access to Electronic Court Records was charging 8 cents per page for information he contended should be free, because federal documents are not covered by copyright. The fees were "plowed back to the courts to finance technology, but the system [ran] a budget surplus of some $150 million, according to court reports," reported The New York Times. PACER used technology that was "designed in the bygone days of screechy telephone modems ... put[ting] the nation's legal system behind a wall of cash and kludge." Malamud appealed to fellow activists, urging them to visit one of 17 libraries conducting a free trial of the PACER system, download court documents, and send them to him for public distribution.

After reading Malamud's call for action, Aaron Swartz used a Perl computer script running on Amazon cloud servers to download the documents, using credentials belonging to a Sacramento library. From September 4 to 20, 2008, it accessed documents and uploaded them to a cloud computing service. He released the documents to Malamud's organization.

On September 29, 2008, the GPO suspended the free trial, "pending an evaluation" of the program. Swartz's actions were subsequently investigated by the FBI. The case was closed after two months with no charges filed. Swartz learned the details of the investigation as a result of filing a FOIA request with the FBI and described their response as the "usual mess of confusions that shows the FBI's lack of sense of humor." PACER still charges per page, but customers using Firefox or Google Chrome have the option of saving the documents for free public access with a plug-in called RECAP.

Carl Malamud (born 2 July 1959) is an American technologist, author, and public domain advocate, known for his foundation Public.Resource.Org. He founded the Internet Multicasting Service. During his time with this group, he was responsible for developing the first Internet radio station, for putting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database on-line, and for creating the Internet 1996 World Exposition.