Public.Resource.Org

Public.Resource.Org is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation dedicated to publishing and sharing public domain materials in the United States and internationally. It was founded by Carl Malamud and is based in Sebastopol, California.

Public.Resource.Org takes particular interest in digitizing and making accessible the works of the United States Federal Government, which because of US government licensing rules for its own work are almost always in the public domain. Major projects conducted by the organization include the digitizing and sharing of large numbers of court records, US government-produced video, and laws of various places.

The organization often advertises its work by saying "Yes We Scan", a play on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign slogan "Yes We Can". The Yes We Scan focus as of autumn 2013 is an effort to digitize and publish every available set of safety standards for every government in the world.

Malamud works on the premise that information in the public domain, and particularly government-generated information of this sort, ought to be as easy as possible for the public to access. In doing this, he identifies interesting collections of information held by organizations which have failed to grant free public access to it. Two typical circumstances are that the creator of the information has failed to make it available online in any form, or that the creator has provided the information to a private company which itself charges fees for access to the information. At this point, Malamud acquires the free information himself, publishes it in public.resource.org as a free communication channel, and then demonstrates publicly that he has made information free when otherwise it would not be and calls for pressure on the holder of the information to collaborate in developing the information release.

In 2013, Public.Resource.Org filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requesting copies of nine annual information reports (Form 990) for tax-exempt entities in MeF (modernized e-file) format. The IRS refused to provide the MeF files, claiming that the effort to edit them to conform to required privacy standards for the filers represented an unreasonable burden. On January 29, 2015, a U.S. District Court ruled against the IRS, requiring that the IRS provide the requested files within 60 days. Observers believe that this decision will result in the IRS moving more rapidly toward providing electronic versions of Form 990 to the public.

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