In response to the U.S. Copyright Office's reply to a letter from Carl Malamud and Peter Brantley (and other co-signers) about the $86,625 cost of the U.S. Copyright Cataloging database, public.resource.org has made the database freely available (Web access and FTP access).
Here's an excerpt from the bulk.resource.org website:
- The "code" directory contains PERL code from 2000 which is used to convert MARC-format records into XML.
- The "raw" directory contains the bulk database product as sold by the Library of Commerce as of the year 2000.
- The "hids" directory contains all bulk data from 1978 to the present. . . .
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."
Source: Brantley, Peter. "Making a Brouhaha in the Blogosphere." O'Reilly Radar, 30 September 2007.