{ texts for nothing }

Michael Geist points to a couple of very interesting Twitter posts from  the editor of the Globe & Mail’s online politics section. Apparently the Globe had embedded a PDF version of one chapter of a report from Canada’s Auditor-General in this story on Canada’s temporary foreign worker policy. In response, the Auditor-General demanded that they take down the PDF, citing copyright infringement — all Canadian government publications are subject to Crown copyright.

The fact that Crown copyright exists is bad enough. In the US, government publications are in the public domain. This has practical value, insofar as Americans can and do use government information for all sorts of clever and useful purposes without worrying about “intellectual property” restrictions. But more importantly, it squares with the fact that the products of government belong to the public. That the Auditor-General would use the language of copyright to restrict access to public information is shameful.

The Globe has complied with the takedown request, but the PDF itself is still available on Scribd. I don’t know whether the Auditor-General intends to submit a takedown request to Scribd as well, but just in case, here’s a local copy of the report.

From a message posted to the Data Liberation Initiative mailing list:

As of April 24, 2006, all electronic publications available on the Statistics Canada website will become free of charge. … The adoption of the New Publishing Model supports the longstanding principles underlying the Agency’s dissemination program: to make information of broad public interest widely available to the Canadian public but to charge individual clients for special products and services where the benefits do not accrue to the public at large and where additional costs are incurred by the Agency in providing them. … The move to free electronic publications will increase consistency in our priced publication program and improve access to our published information for users, respondents and stakeholders.

This is a significant step towards opening up access to Canadian government information. We’re still stuck with Crown copyright (unlike in the US, where government documents are in the public domain), but it looks like the federal government is starting to move in the right direction.