New York Times as calling this “a big win for the American public” that things settled down. I’ve been a big A1 Gore fan every since.
In the course of my work placing standards online, I had noticed that federal employees made substantial contributions to many of these crucial safety laws, yet the private standards bodies persisted in asserting copyright over them. This same practice extended much more broadly into scholarly publishing. Because of my work in the law, I had followed with interest President Obama’s scholarly pursuits, and carefully read an article he published in the Harvard Law Review. It seemed strange to me that the Harvard Law Review was asserting copyright over his work, and I noticed the same practice in other journals such as Science where he published pieces.
A prominent foundation had approached me in 2016 to do something about this situation. In October of 2016, they had made an offer of $500,000 for 2017 and $400,000 in 2018 to work in this area. There was a catch, though. They had demanded a seat on our board of directors and wanted to exert detailed control over my work, including making the money available in frequent payments, each subject to meeting milestones. I remembered sitting in Dinesh Trivedi’s bungalow calling back to the U.S. and learning those terms, then coming out to the living room and telling Dinesh and Sam that I had just turned down a $900,000 grant.
I had explained to the foundation that their work would allow us to study in depth the question of works of government, notify the publishers and the government of any violations we found, and then perhaps post any articles that were clearly in the public domain. However, most of this money would be going to scanning any journal articles (an expensive proposition if you do it at scale), paying for graduate students in the library sciences, and expenses of that sort.
What the grant would not cover, however, were legal expenses. Even if we found a huge number of journal articles that were clearly in the public domain, the publishers are a litigious bunch and there is no guarantee they would not sue just out of spite or as a delaying tactic to preserve their ill-gotten revenue streams.
In other words, this was a highly risky project. The reason I turned down the money was that I could not allow a foundation official to join our board and direct our activities, particularly since I had never worked with this fellow. Some foundations insist on pay to play: they give you money if you carry out a
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