Copyright README

[David Farber <dfarber () cs cmu edu>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Carl Malamud <carl () media org>
Date: September 30, 2007 12:22:41 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Copyright README

From the README at http://bulk.resource.org/copyright/:

This directory contains raw data from the U.S. Copyright
Office of the Library of Congress.  Related to this
directory are two communications, one to the U.S. Copyright
Office, the other a response from the Library of Congress,
which functions as the commercial agent for the Copyright
Office:

        http://public.resource.org/letter_to_peters.html
        http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=187

While the Copyright Office maintains a record-oriented
interface, that does not provide adequate facilities to
meet their public access obligations.  This directory,
accessible via FTP and HTTP, contains 3 sub-directories:

1. The "code" directory contains PERL code from 2000 which
   is used to convert MARC-format records into XML.

2. The "raw" directory contains the bulk database product
   as sold by the Library of Commerce as of the year 2000.

3. The "hids" directory contains all bulk data from 1978
   to the present.  The record-oriented interface maintained
   by the Copyright Office is limited to interactive keyword
   searches.  Their system identifies each record with a
   unique Hidden ID (HID).  This directory thus contains
   all 21 million of those records sorted in HID order,
   as well as a per-HID retrieval utility.

In posting these data, we rely partly on voicemail from the
Honorable Marybeth Peters, the U.S. Register of Copyrights
received Fri Sep 21 16:17:02 PDT 2007 in response to the
above-mentioned letter, in which Ms. Peters states that
"I think our records should be available to the public.
Certainly there's no copyright in any of the copyright
records.  Certainly they're public records and they should
be openly available."


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