International Amateur Scanning League

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

URL = http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/02/international-amateur-scanning.html

“Impatient with the lethargy of the federal government in making its own films and videos available online, info-activist Carl Malamud has launched the International Amateur Scanning League. Dozens of volunteers are digitizing government-produced DVDs on everything from agricultural advice to presidential addresses, and putting them on the Internet.

Some 200,000 such DVDs are nominally available to the American people, but unless you live in Washington, D.C., and can personally visit the National Archives, your only option is to buy a copy from Amazon.com. The Scanning League aims to liberate those videos for everyone — for free.” (http://www.onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2680)


More Information

• NYT Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/technology/15fedflix.html :

“The International Amateur Scanning League may represent a new model of commoner/government cooperation. Why not enlist commoners to take water quality samples and aggregate them in real-time for use by the EPA? Why not host online networks of auto enthusiasts to report suspected design flaws in their automobiles, so that everyone won’t have to wait years for the automaker to ‘fess up to the problems (as Toyota was recently forced to do)?”