Cory Doctorow writes the following about Carl Malamud:

Carl is the beloved “rogue librarian” who has done so much to liberate tax-funded government works, from movies to court rulings to the text of laws themselves, putting these public domain works on the Internet where they belong.

By the People is an inspirational and education piece on the history of the US Government Printing Office and the radical ethic that said that the governments documents belonged to the citizens who footed the bill for their production. Today, with the Internet making it more possible than ever for all of us to inspect the workings of our governments and benefit from their creations, that ethic is more important (and more endangered) than ever.