7 Tales of Bureaucracy
Simple enough: buy video from the government and upload it. Nobody can stop you. Simple that is, except for the cost.
But what if we spread the pain out? What if other people bought some of these tapes and donated them to the public domain? For $29.95 a month, I signed up for EBay's ProStores, one of those anybody-can-build-a-store ecommerce solutions, and built a front-end proxy on top of the NTIS store. The deal was we'd take your money, order the tape, upload it to the Internet Archive and YouTube, and you'd get a tax deduction.
In a fit of marketing, we festooned the site with slogans: "Be the last person to buy this fine video" and "Buy from us and you get nothing but everybody gets something."
And, my favorite: "Made by the government—buy in confidence knowing the source."
OK, so it was a little cheeky and perhaps even a bit silly. But, the whole business model was silly. With no intellectual property protection on the content—all of it works of the government, all already paid for by taxpayer dollars—if we had enough money we'd simply buy one copy of each video and we'd be done with it. They'd be out of business.
The store was snazzy, but there were more "lookie loos" than buyers. In fact, we got only one order for $106, and that order was actually a mistake—the guy thought we were going to send him a DVD.
One day I lost my patience and sent a rather intemperate fax to the director of the NTIS. A letter is probably not the appropriate characterization for this
