Carl Malamud gave today's Distinguished Lecture at the UC Berkeley School of Information entitled, "(Re-)Defining the Public Domain". Audio of the event is here and some pictures are here.
It was a fascinating talk -- almost a performance of sorts -- where Malamud described efforts to increase the public domain along the three branches of our government. His talk incorporated something like 31 individual videos and, unfortunately, the audio provided here can do only so much justice to that content.
Here is the abstract of Carl's talk:
While much of the focus on intellectual property goes to battles over copyright or patents, we should not forget that a large proportion of such material is not property at all. The public domain is available for all to use. Of particular interest for the public domain is the U.S. government, all of whose work is available without restriction for all of us to use.
In this lecture, Carl Malamud explains the principles of the public domain with particular emphasis on the works of government. He will discuss how government often backs away from the clear principle of no property interests in order to maintain control, and how citizens can change that attitude through concrete actions. Malamud will use his own experience in forcing changes in government policy with numerous agencies to illustrate these general principles.
UPDATE [2007-10-22T09:25:04]: The audio linked to above has been updated to include the audio from each of the videos that Carl showed (thanks, Carl!). Also, you can watch a broadcast of the video from Carl's slides hosted by the Internet Archive here.
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