Open Access Ninja

“The Brew of Law.”

I call him the “rogue archivist.” Carl Malamud’s been around a long while, doing a lot of stuff. He could have been yet another tech entrepreneur (he pioneered streaming audio) but no, he chose the less glamorous, less remunerative, more important life of a tech activist.

For decades, Carl’s cause has been open access: universal access to all knowledge. He worked with Aaron Swartz to publish millions of pages of paywalled court documents. He published proprietary building and safety codes that had been turned into law that you had to pay to read.

Point Carl at a proprietary, paywalled source of public knowledge and he’ll rip it, digitize it, annotate it, and publish it — no matter what the risk. He’s been sued for millions. The Georgia legislature tried to take him to the Supreme Court. They lost. He won.

He usually wins, because he’s on the right side of history. The knowledge that we produce at public expense — laws, records, safety codes, art, legislative debates — belong to all of us.

They should not — they must not — be locked up through private-public partnerships that let hoarders charge us a toll to access the knowledge we all helped to produce, for our common good.

Carl’s genius isn’t merely in his ethical commitment to open access — it’s his…