freeing copyright data

Messages went out on the Digital Library Federation (DLF) mailing list and on O'Reilly Radar yesterday letting us know that DLF had helped set free the entire dataset from the U.S. Copyright Office's copyright registration database. LC pointed out that Congress set the rules for charging, but they should have known that their referring to the issue as a "blogospheric brouhaha" was just going to drive someone to do something.

DLF and Public.Resource.Org sent a request to open access to the data. Lots of sites picked this up, including BoingBoing. The registration database is a compilation of facts -- it's not copyrightable itself. The U.S. Register of Copyright agreed that these are public records and should be available in bulk.

So Public.Resource.Org and DLF made it so.

It's extremely exciting to see DLF lobbying so effectively and participating in an effort to make data available via open access, and help all libraries provide better copyright search services. BoingBoing celebrates them as guerrilla librarians. This is not your father's DLF.