A few media outlets reported last summer that the NYPD, in its continuing efforts to crack down on the sometimes-annoying costumed characters in Times Square, had asked Disney and Marvel to initiate copyright action there. Disney and Marvel didn’t bite. I requested the communications (or records thereof) under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, and […]
Tag Archives: foia
Vegetation Wants To Be Free, a Wikicon talk on pomological watercolors
I spoke last weekend at Wikicon USA about the several months I’ve spent learning about—and making more publicly available—the pomological watercolor collection I wrote about in these pages last April. The talk is now online, and is about 20 minutes (and a bit frenetic).
Dropping docs on Jacob the painting police horse
Muckrock has written an article on Jacob, the painting police horse of St. Petersburg, Florida, based on documents I obtained through a public records request to the local police in April. There’s no scandal here, but it’s fun to read about a city so smitten with their talented equestrian officers. Perhaps my favorite missive comes […]
Oakland’s awesome public records request system
Oakland’s employee compensation database is the kind of public record that should be proactively available, even with historical versions, without requiring a formal public records request. But since I couldn’t find it online, I filed a request, and got to interact for the first time with Oakland’s very cool RecordTrac system for handling those requests. […]
The US government should release these 7,584 fruit paintings
The federal government is sitting on 7,584 historical agricultural watercolor paintings that it should make freely available to the public today. Currently, people have access only to low-quality previews of the images; the United States Department of Agriculture, where the archive is held, should serve the public interest by making the entire collection of high […]