Ransom America's public domain video treasures back from the National Archives!

By at 10:05 pm Saturday, Dec 19

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,
If you've already made your Christmas gifts to EFF and Creative Commons and have a couple of bucks left over? How about buying a gift for the public domain!!

Public.Resource.Org just ordered another 41 titles and spent $560 on some really great FedFlix from the vaults of the National Archive, there is still plenty of great material out there, so we put together an Amazon Wish List. If you see anything you'd like to buy the public domain we'll take your DVD and upload the video to YouTube, the Internet Archive, and to our own rsync/ftp public domain stock footage library.
Background: these videos were made at US taxpayer expense, and they are in the public domain. However, they aren't distributed for free by the National Archives; instead they're sold through Amazon as a money-maker for the government, which charges you to get access to the stuff you already own and paid for. The Archives get a minuscule amount of money by doing this: $3,273.66 over the past two years! In order to make a measly three grand, the National Archives have closed off the entire USA's access to its video treasures.

Public Domain Videos from the Vaults of the National Archives (Thanks, Carl)

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Cory Doctorow

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