Tag Archives: foia

NYPD denies records of copyright communications it had previously acknowledged

posted on 21 February, 2016 also tagged , , , ,

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 […]

Vegetation Wants To Be Free, a Wikicon talk on pomological watercolors

posted on 13 October, 2015 also tagged , , , ,

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

posted on 31 July, 2015 also tagged , ,

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

posted on 4 May, 2015 also tagged , ,

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

posted on 12 April, 2015 also tagged , , , , ,

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 […]