hmmm...Sounds a little like the ARG/augmented reality games from Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End.

Wow, it's like the last 48 hours of boingboing has been an advertisement for Cory's new book.

Not that I mind that--after all, like most 'mainstream Internet users' I'm 'hugely aware of the fact that the fundamental economic model on the Internet is advertising.' (Although I'm not a Charter subscriber.)

But the tone and the attitude of the rent-a-cops and transit workers is so close to what's in Little Brother: either the future is now, Cory has clever plants taking photos in DC and LA, or life is imitating fiction.

Yeah, it's wacky. And it gets a little wackier if you read the actual copyright claim of the state. It doesn't claim copyright over the actual text of the laws--just the numbering scheme, tables of contents, and other organizing features.

This is very much a relic of the print era, but the relevant laws (and I think it's actually the Oregon constitution that reserves copyright on Oregon government information--but don't quote me on that I'm too lazy to look it up) are also being used to lock up data across the state. I bump up against this in my job as a GIS data librarian--some counties and cities gladly give me their data for free ("We're just happy someone at the U might look at it.") while others charge exorbitantly because they can claim copyright. Moreover, the cost bears little relation to value: the largest local government in the state will sell me a CD-ROM of most of their data for $65. Similar data from a different county might run $1500.

My understanding of the New York Times archive is that one business unit decided to open the archive, made the announcement and dropped the charging mechanisms without checking with another business unit, which had already signed exclusive deals with vendors such as Lexis-Nexis and Proquest, who had developed their own search engines and backfiles as 'value added' redistributions / reenclosures of the content.

It's one example of an industry catering to early adopting paying customers (primarily libraries and newspapers in this case) and inadvertently screwing the Commons in the process. There's all that good New York Times content that's probably not covered by copyright anymore too (which is how Cornell got away with digitizing the older Atlantic content in the first place).