In this lecture, Carl Malamud will discuss efforts to make government and non-government information more broadly available, efforts that are part of a global movement to make access to knowledge a reality for all. He’ll discuss his own work in India and the United States to make government information, such as technical standards and laws, more available and will discuss the different treatment of “edicts of government” under the U.S. and India copyright acts and constitutions. He will then discusss efforts to make other important information, such as scientific journal articles available, and the status of the teaching exemption under Indian law, as well as efforts to make “works of government” available to the public. In addition to discussing the law, Carl will discuss how individuals can help change the way our government work, drawing on the lessons of Satyagraha from Gandhiji and from diverse examples of civil resistance throughout the world, such as the efforts Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States.

Carl Malamud is the founder of Public.Resource.Org (“Public Resource”), a California-based NGO widely credited with placing many large government databases online and then working with governments to get them to do this themselves. In the United States, Public Resource helped pioneer the free law movement by placing historical opinions of the U.S. Court of Appeals on the Internet for the first time. Public Resource also helped place numerous other resources on-line such as 14,000 hours of video from U.S. congressional hearings and assisted the Obama transition team in changing how the Federal Register, the official gazette of the United States, is published. For the last few years, Public Resource has been working intensively in India, including an effort to make available all Indian Standards for free on the net, an issue that is the subject of Public Internet Litigation suit in the Hon’ble High Court of Delhi. Carl started the first radio station on the Internet and is the author of 9 books, including most recently (with Sam Pitroda), Code Swaraj: Field Notes from the Standards Satyagraha.