Building on the corpus of the free and digital public domain !
Lessig links to a very cool new application that builds on the corpus of freely available public domain materials about our government representatives. It’s called apture, and there’s a little video that shows how it works on other people’s sites to allow you to see lots of information sources pulled together for a particular person, for example, John Kerry, and how you can install it on your site. Just takes a few minutes to watch.
I really like how nicely this ap demonstrates the value of a freely available and accessible digital public domain. All of the materials apture pulls together are in the public domain, so the barriers to its entry into this market are a lot lower than they would be if apture had to seek out and negotiate licenses to use every little shred of information about our representatives. Very good example of the idea that free can be the basis of a lot of value.
