Carl sez,
Boing Boing readers may remember the headline from two weeks ago which read "Guerrilla librarians free the $86k Library of Congress copyright database."
"A couple of weeks ago, we wrote to Marybeth Peters, the Register of U.S. Copyrights, to ask why the copyright database had a copyright, and why it cost $86,000. On Friday, the Library of Congress blogged the issue, and dismissed the whole thing as a 'blogospheric brouhaha.' Well, the Library of Commerce can diss our distinguished signatories all they want, but lucky thing is these are all public records, and we're making all 21 million of them available for download."
Well, we just received a nice letter from the Copyright Office saying that what we did is A-OK and it is just fine to harvest their records. In a phone call, the Register of Copyrights said she was happy their database was reaching new audiences.
We'll continue to spider that database, and have just added a nice RSS feed of the latest copyright additions.
(Thanks, Carl!)
