Carl Malamud

description: American technologist, author and public domain advocate (1959-)

14 results

pages: 397 words: 102,910

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet
by Justin Peters
Published 11 Feb 2013

New York Times, February 12, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html. 74 “Aaron Swartz’s FBI File,” Firedoglake, February 19, 2013, http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/02/19/aaron-swartzs-fbi-file/. 75 Ibid. 76 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, April 14, 2009, 11:02 a.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00689.html. 77 Aaron Swartz to Carl Malamud, April 14, 2009, 12:52 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00693.html. 78 Aaron Swartz to Carl Malamud, April 15, 2009, 8:56 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00712.html. 79 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, April 15, 2009, 9:01 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00713.html. 80 Aaron Swartz, “Wanted by the FBI,” Raw Thought, October 5, 2009, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile. 81 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, January 26, 2009, 6:47 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00509.html. 82 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, January 27, 2009, 11:10 a.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00511.html. 83 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, January 27, 2009, 11:55 a.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00513.html. 84 Ibid. 85 “Projects,” Content Liberation Front, crawled on August 29, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20090829123824/http://contentliberation.com/. 8.

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Court Records for Free,” Wired, December 12, 2008. 49 Ibid. 50 “16 Frequently Asked Questions about Recycling Your PACER Documents,” https://public.resource.org/uscourts.gov/recycling.html. 51 US Courts, “Pilot Project: Free Access to Federal Court Records at 16 Libraries,” news release, November 8, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071112035705/http://www.uscourts.gov/Press_Releases/libraries110807.html. 52 Carl Malamud in The Internet’s Own Boy (2014), at 32:05. 53 “16 Frequently Asked Questions.” 54 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, September 4, 2008, 2:59 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00180.html. 55 Aaron Swartz to Carl Malamud, September 4, 2008, 2:57 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00179.html. 56 Aaron Swartz, “today’s featured superhero: Carl Malamud,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, June 16, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000345. 57 Aaron Swartz, “Introducing web.resource.org,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, July 2, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000381. 58 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, June 25, 2002, 8:13 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00001.html. 59 US Courts, “Pilot Project: Free Access to Federal Court Records at 16 Libraries,” news release, November 8, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071206094450/http://www.uscourts.gov/Press_Releases/libraries110807.html. 60 Eric Hellman, “The Four Crimes of Aaron Swartz (#aaronswnyc part 2),” go to hellman, January 25, 2013, http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-four-crimes-of-aaron-swartz.html. 61 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, September 4, 2008, 7:40 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00195.html. 62 Aaron Swartz to Carl Malamud, September 4, 2008, 10:41 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00196.html. 63 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, September 4, 2008, 7:43 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00197.html. 64 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, September 22, 2008, 7:26 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00298.html. 65 Aaron Swartz to Carl Malamud, September 22, 2008, 10:37 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00299.html. 66 Aaron Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access,” Raw Thought, September 20, 2008, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/goa (page deleted). 67 “Software Freedom Day, Sept. 20th, 2008,” Free Software Foundation, September 29, 2008, https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/sfd2008blog. 68 Aaron Swartz to Carl Malamud, October 1, 2008, 1:12 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00327.html. 69 Carl Malamud to Aaron Swartz, September 30, 2008, 5:31 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00319.html. 70 American Association of Law Libraries, AALL Washington E-Bulletin, October 31, 2008, http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Advocacy/aallwash/Washington-E-Bulletin/2008/ebulletin103108.pdf. 71 Ibid. 72 Malamud to Swartz, September 30, 2008, 5:13 p.m. 73 John Schwartz, “An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy.”

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pages: 212 words: 49,544

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency
by Micah L. Sifry
Published 19 Feb 2011

One percent of that is one hundred Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.19 John Perry Barlow’s infowar has begun in earnest, because a signiﬁcant portion of the population that is leaning forward and choosing to produce and share information—a piece of this gigantic cognitive surplus, if you will—has decided that we would like to know what is actually going on. 63 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY 4 Kicking Down the Door to the Smoke-Filled Room Transparency is the new objectivity. ––David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, speaking at Personal Democracy Forum June 20091 If the transparency movement in the United States has a modern father, his name is Carl Malamud. In the early 1990s, Malamud was running a nonproﬁt called the Internet Multicasting Service. A small controversy arose between public-interest advocates and the Securities and Exchange Commission over access to the commission’s EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) database of ﬁlings from public corporations and other ﬁnancial institutions.

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As these projects proliferate, a community of practice is steadily evolving with some common understandings about how best to work together. First, there is an emerging consensus on the need for open data and common standards. In December 2007, I was privileged to be one of thirty open government advocates who gathered in Sebastopol, California, for a meeting hosted by Carl Malamud and Tim O’Reilly to develop a set of principles for “open government data.” Our group, which included Josh Tauberer of GovTrack.us, Tom Steinberg of mySociety.org, David Moore and Donny Shaw of OpenCongress.org, Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center, and Lawrence Lessig (then at Stanford), came up with a simple declaration of eight core principles.

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Chapter 4 1 David Weinberger, “Transparency is the New Objectivity,” JOHO the Blog, July 19, 2009, www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2009/07/19/transparency-isthe-new-objectivity. The video of Weinberger’s talk is posted here www. youtube.com/watch?v=o3qSDLF6lU4. 2 John Markoﬀ, “Plan Opens More Data to the Public,” The New York Times, October 22, 1993. 3 Carl Malamud, “By the People,” Address to the Government 2.0 Summit, Washington D.C., September 9, 2009, http://public.resource.org/people. 4 John Markoﬀ, “Group to Widen Access to Federal Data Bases,” The New York Times, December 23, 1994. 5 Gary Ruskin, “America Oﬀ-Line: Gingrich’s Unfulﬁlled Internet Promise,” The Washington Post, November 16, 1997, www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-srv/politics/govt/fedguide/stories/ﬁg112197.htm. 6 Daniel Charles, “2006 Young Innovators Under 35,” Technology Review, www.technologyreview.biz/TR35/Proﬁle.aspx?

pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

It is the job of every business to ask itself what technology makes possible today not just for its customers, but for how the business itself is organized to serve them. That is also the job for other institutions, such as government. 7 GOVERNMENT AS A PLATFORM MY FASCINATION WITH THE INTERSECTION OF GOVERNMENT and technology began with my friend Carl Malamud, a longtime advocate for technology in the public interest. In 1993, early in the history of the World Wide Web, Carl was helping Sun Microsystems give a demonstration of the capabilities of the Internet to the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance. After the demonstration, Subcommittee Chairman Representative Edward J.

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Amazon hadn’t yet revolutionized the industry by launching its cloud services platform, but the value of the Internet as a platform, and the nature of that platform, was becoming clearer to me. I had become convinced that the next generation Internet platform was a data platform, and I had noticed that government was the source of much of that data. The work that Carl Malamud had kicked off a decade earlier was just the tip of the iceberg. Google Maps, whose interactive JavaScript (“Ajax”) interface was one of the WTF? technologies of 2005, was, like all online mapping services, built using base maps licensed from the government. And when hackers realized that they could build “mashups” placing other data on Google Maps, government data was one of the first places they turned.

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Jennifer Pahlka, who is now my wife, became TechWeb’s general manager for the project, and a crucial thought partner. As I began developing the content for the new Gov 2.0 Summit, one of my first visits was with Eric Schmidt, then Google’s CEO, whom I’d known since the days that we both worked with Carl Malamud back in 1993. I knew Eric had spent a lot of time in Washington, and I thought he’d have good advice. He did, but it wasn’t the specific set of recommendations I expected. “Go to DC,” he said. “Talk to a lot of people, and tell us what you make of it. You’re good at it. That’s what you do.” The idea that we should make “government as a platform” the centerpiece of our new event came to me in a conversation with Frank DiGiammarino, then a vice president at the National Academy of Public Administration and later a special assistant to Vice President Joe Biden involved in the administration of the 2009 Recovery Act.

pages: 25 words: 5,789

Data for the Public Good
by Alex Howard
Published 21 Feb 2012

In the transportation sector, for instance, transit data is open government fuel for economic growth. There is a tremendous amount of work ahead in building upon the foundations that civil society has constructed over decades. If you want a deep look at what the work of digitizing data really looks like, read Carl Malamud’s interview with Slashdot on opening government data. Data for the public good, however, goes far beyond government’s own actions. In many cases, it will happen despite government action — or, often, inaction — as civic developers, data scientists and clinicians pioneer better analysis, visualization and feedback loops.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

“What was so striking about Aaron”: “Sir Tim Berners-Lee pays tribute to Aaron Swartz,” Telegraph, January 14, 2013. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive: Brewster Kahle, speaking at a memorial to Aaron Swartz, January 24, 2013. Malamud emailed him back: Carl Malamud archives, Aaron Swartz email message 299, https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00299.html. “You definitely went over the line”: Carl Malamud archives, Aaron Swartz email message 319, https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00319.html. federal agents were conducting: John Schwartz, “An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy,” New York Times, February 12, 2009.

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They were workable for journalists and interested companies, but the interfaces were clunky, which meant accessing many of their records was cumbersome for average citizens—who should be able both to act as journalists and to locate their own information—to reach. Some of Swartz’s idols were already on the case. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive was interested in “freeing” information, particularly government court cases. Carl Malamud, a freedom-of-information advocate Swartz had admired since his teenage years, had founded a nonprofit group called Public.Resource.Org. In 2008 Malamud put out a call for hackers and librarians to help him liberate an out-of-date and cumbersome public records system called Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER).

pages: 297 words: 89,820

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness
by Steven Levy
Published 23 Oct 2006

The term is a bit controversial, because, frankly, the iPod s claim to an Internet-based vocal upheaval is somewhat tenuous. Long before the iPod—years before the existence of any digital music player— someone was using the Internet as if it were a mixture of broadcasting and the VCR. This was Carl Malamud, an itinerant tech writer working in Washington, D.C. He was an early Internet proselytizer who in 1992 had just returned from going around the world—three times—to research a book about people involved in building the Net. He would routinely go off to Internet Engineering Task Force meetings, where the pioneers of the global grid would deal in the deep gnarly realm of standards and protocols.

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Once I engaged in a round of interviews and investigation for the book, I was aided in my work by Jodi Mardesch, a truly over-qualified researcher. Victoria Wright did her usual terrific job of transcribing tapes (and this time, MP3 files). Kevin McCarthy and J. Gabriel Boylan painstakingly fact-checked the manuscript. Brooke Hammerling and Julie Panebianco helped with music industry connections. Thanks also to J. J. Jacobi, Carl Malamud, Bruce Schneier, and John MarkofF. My agent. Flip Brophy, not only supplied the usual good advice but the perfect place to work during crunch time. (Thanks also to everyone at Sterling Lord Literistic.) I'm happy that David Rosenthal of Simon & Schuster finally bought one of my books, and happier still to be edited by Bob Bender, who even kept his cool when I told him my idea about shuffling the book.

pages: 396 words: 113,613

Chokepoint Capitalism
by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
Published 26 Sep 2022

Not every use of copyrighted material is prohibited by copyright law, and it’s impossible for an algorithm to figure out whether a snippet of a news report, sports broadcast, or song is allowed. It may be that the amount taken is too insignificant to infringe, or that it’s in the public domain—as is the case where copyright has expired. The president of Public.Resource.Org, Carl Malamud, told us they received over three hundred Content ID matches on some six thousand government videos they posted to YouTube and proved all but two were false positives. At least in part due to Malamud’s efforts, YouTube added “It’s public domain” to the list of reasons for contesting a Content ID match.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Alex Adsett, Jake Beaumont-Nesbitt, Jamie Boyle, Alicia Brown, Richard Burgess, Peter Carstensen, Seb Chan, Colleen Cross, Kevin Erickson, Jacob Flynn, Ula Furgal, Daniel Gilbert, Jane C. Ginsburg, Jake Goldenfein, David Goodman, Evan Greer, Amanda Harcourt, Matt Hawn, Gwen Hinze, Justine Hyde, Jennifer Jenkins, Olivia Lanchester, Aurora Lucien, Carl Malamud, Paris Marx, Susan May, Corynne McSherry, Michelle Meagher, James Meese, Rev. Moose, Lisa Morrison, Daniel Olszewski, Lizzie O’Shea, James Parker, Liz Pelly, Palmyre Pessiot, Paola Pessiot, François Petitjean, JP Pomare, Bram Presser, João Pedro Quintais, Mary Rasenberger, Barak Richman, Sam Ricketson, Juliet Rogers, Orna Ross, Tom Ryan, Stefan Rudnicki, Pam Samuelson, Nicholas Shaxson, David Slack, Nicola Solomon, Matt Stoller, Zephyr Teachout, Kay Tucker, Diane Wachtell, Christina Ward, Kim Weatherall, Tim Wu, Joshua Yuvaraj, and Brian Zisk.

pages: 675 words: 141,667

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
by Andrew L. Russell
Published 27 Apr 2014

But its exaggerations (“these guys don’t even use computers”) also reveal how little Rose (and many other Internet engineers) actually knew about the computer experts who worked within OSI committees, including the Turing Award winner Bachman and French computer scientists such as Zimmermann, Michel Gien, and Najah Naffah, who moved on to successful and lucrative careers after leaving the Cyclades project at the end of the 1970s.42 Nevertheless, Rose continued his 1990 The Open Book: A Practical Perspective on OSI along the same lines: “The Internet community tries its very best to ignore the OSI community. By and large, OSI technology is ugly in comparison to Internet technology.” Rose was by no means alone in his ritualistic disparagement of OSI. For example, Carl Malamud, in his 1992 “technical travelogue” of networking in twenty-one countries across the world, suggested that trying to implement OSI over slow, low-quality lines was “akin to looking for a hippopotamus capable of doing the limbo.”43 In summary, Internet engineers in the 1980s and 1990s developed a well-worn critique of OSI – a critique that operated simultaneously on technical, institutional, and aesthetic levels.

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For a richer and more balanced view of X.400 message handling standards, see Susanne K. Schmidt and Raymund Werle, Coordinating Technology: Studies in the International Standardization of Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 229–262. 43 Marshall Rose, The Open Book: A Practical Perspective on OSI (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 591–592; Carl Malamud, Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall PTR, 1992), 191. 44 Lyman Chapin, quoted in Gary Malkin (1990), “Who’s Who in the Internet: Biographies of IAB, IESG, and IRSG Members,” RFC 1336, http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1336, (accessed September 25, 2013); Einar Stefferud, quoted in Marshall T.

pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

It combines non-profit activities such as “civic hacking” with for-profit companies; it appeals to the civil liberties ideals of government transparency but also advocates free-market outcomes; it claims to focus on empowering the powerless, but too often empowers the already-empowered. Many would trace the origins of the open government data movement to Carl Malamud’s efforts to make available public domain information such as laws and regulations from various levels of government, and to put the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database online. The common arguments for making government data open are expressed by the UK Open Knowledge Foundation:39 increasing transparency (citizens need to know what their government is doing), releasing social and commercial value (driving the creation of innovative businesses and services), and encouraging participation and engagement (in an echo of Lessig’s Remix, making a full “read/write” society).

pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
by Andrew Blum
Published 28 May 2012

Janet Abbate, Exploring the Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). Paul E. Ceruzzi, Internet Alley (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). C. David Chaffee, Building the Global Fiber Optics Superhighway (New York: Kluwer Academic, 2001). Katie Hafner and Michael Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Carl Malamud, Exploring the Internet (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993). Stephan Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1 (New York: T.V. Books, 1998). Kazys Varnelis, The Infrastructural City (Barcelona, Spain: Actar, 2008). “the Internet lacks a central founding figure…”: Roy Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1534.

pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
by Robin Chase
Published 14 May 2015

Personal correspondence with Peter Corbett. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Peter Corbett and Vivek Kundra were indeed the first to flesh out what standardized open data for government would look like from an implementation perspective. At little less than a year before Corbett and Kundra met up, Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media and Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org had hosted a meeting of thirty people interested in framing what “open government” might look like. 15. World Resources Institute, “Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas,” www.wri.org/resources/maps/aqueduct-water-risk-atlas. 16. “Ethiopia Toto Agriculture Portal,” Data.gov, April 25, 2013, www.data.gov/food/applications/ethiopia-toto-agriculture-portal. 17.

pages: 347 words: 100,038

This Is for Everyone: The Captivating Memoir From the Inventor of the World Wide Web
by Tim Berners-Lee
Published 8 Sep 2025

He spent a lot of time at the MIT campus and I was one of his mentors. He attended semantic web meetings, and he’d often come for lunch in my office. He was lively, intelligent and connected, with wonderful enthusiasm. Aaron’s approach to opening government data was more direct than my own. In 2008, in collaboration with Carl Malamud, an advocate of the public domain, Aaron had downloaded much of the database of US federal court records known as PACER. Even though it was public information, you had to pay to access PACER, and Aaron thought this was unfair. Working at the public library, Aaron created a Python script that automatically pulled requests from the site, and, over a few weeks, he and others collected nearly 20 million pages of legal documents and placed them in a free online archive, called RECAP.

pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Jan 2016

Sharing these internal documents with the public seems obviously good, and indeed, much good has come out of publishing these documents, whether it’s the National Security Archive, whose Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have revealed decades of government wrongdoing around the globe, or the indefatigable Carl Malamud and his scanning, which has put terabytes of useful government documents, from laws to movies, online for everyone to access freely. I suspect few people would put “publishing government documents on the web” high on their list of political priorities, but it’s a fairly cheap project (just throw piles of stuff into scanners) and doesn’t seem to have much downside.

pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

Our brainy descendants will have other things to worry about. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it. ABBIE HOFFMAN I want to thank those who lent a kind (and critical) eye to early drafts of this book. These good folks include Stefan Jones, John Gilmore, Steve Jackson, Carl Malamud, Roger Clarke, Oliver Morton, John Perry Barlow, Bruce Murray, Bruce Sterling, Chris Peterson, Robin Hanson, Xavier Fan, Martha Minow, Ann Florini, Peter Swire, Michael Foale, Gregory Benford, Joe Miller, Robert Qualkinbush, Gary T. Marx, Wendy Grossman, Steinn Sigurdsson, Jonathan R. Will, Joseph Carroll, Eric J.