Carl Malamud

Apr 29, 2026

Founder, Public.Resource.Org · Internet Pioneer · Co-founder, Servants of Knowledge

Sebastopol, California, USA

Biography

Carl Malamud (born 2 July 1959) is an American technologist, author, and one of the most consequential open-access and public-domain advocates of the internet era. Over four decades he has deployed a distinctive methodology — buying or obtaining material at his own expense, placing it online for free, and daring governments and institutions to take it back — to pry vast bodies of publicly owned information out of paywalls, bureaucratic silos, and proprietary databases. He is the founder of Public.Resource.Org, a 501(c)(3) non-profit based in Sebastopol, California, dedicated to making government and public-domain information freely accessible globally. He has authored nine books, was a visiting professor at the MIT Media Laboratory, served as chairman of the Internet Software Consortium, co-founded the technology company Invisible Worlds, was a board member of the Mozilla Foundation, and served as chief technology officer at the Center for American Progress. He has described his guiding conviction in a single sentence: "The access to knowledge is a fundamental right, and the only way to solve various problems facing the globe is through an informed citizen."

Early Career: Internet Pioneering

Malamud came of age professionally in the 1980s working on computer networks and databases, developing expertise that positioned him at the frontier of the emerging internet. His early career produced a series of genuine firsts. In 1993 he founded the Internet Multicasting Service, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit, and from an office in the National Press Building ran Internet Talk Radio — the first radio station on the internet, a weekly show interviewing computer experts, delivered over the nascent MBone multicast network. He brought live congressional hearings, United Nations anniversary events, and concerts to internet listeners years before streaming became mainstream; he is sometimes described, retrospectively, as the first podcaster. In the same period he put the White House on the internet for the first time, during the Clinton administration in 1993. He organised the Internet 1996 World Exposition, a sprawling online world's fair. He also moved the SEC's EDGAR database — corporate filings that had previously required fees to access through a private vendor — onto the internet free of charge, allowing investors, journalists, and citizens to download company information directly. He is the former chairman of the Internet Software Consortium. This body of early work earned him a reputation as what Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle has called "a disrupter for the public good."

Public.Resource.Org and the Campaign for Open Law

In 2007 Malamud founded Public.Resource.Org (Public Resource) in Sebastopol, California. Its mission, as simple as it is radical: publish government information — documents, videos, laws, court records, safety standards — that the public already owns but cannot freely access. He has worked across the political spectrum, writing letters, giving speeches, meeting officials in person, and, when necessary, filing or defending lawsuits. Legal fees alone have consumed millions of dollars of his own resources and those of pro bono law firms. Key campaigns include:

PACER and court records2008 — Challenged the federal court archive's per-page fee for court documents, coordinating a mass download of public filings (in which Aaron Swartz participated) to demonstrate that government records should be freely available.
C-SPAN liberalisation2007 — Petitioned for broader access to congressional video recordings; the EFF credited his campaign with persuading C-SPAN to significantly liberalise access to its archive.
Safety standards — Published technical safety codes and building regulations (which in many US states and at the federal level are incorporated into law but sold by private standards bodies) for free online, triggering a multi-year legal confrontation with industry groups defended with support from the EFF.
Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org2013–2020 — After purchasing and publishing the Official Code of Georgia Annotated online, was sued by the state of Georgia for copyright infringement. After a lower court ruled against him, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit unanimously reversed the decision. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled 5–4 in 2020 that the OCGA cannot be copyrighted — a landmark victory establishing that government-authored annotations to the law belong to the public.
US federal case law2007–ongoing — Began publishing the full text of US legal opinions dating from 1880, working toward a free publicly accessible database of the entirety of US case law.
Government film archive — Digitised 588 government films and deposited them on the Internet Archive and YouTube, making decades of publicly produced documentary footage freely available for the first time.

India and Servants of Knowledge

Alongside his work in the United States, Malamud became deeply engaged with India — drawn by what he describes as the country's ancient tradition of access to and dissemination of knowledge, and by his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy and its applicability to the digital age. He coined the term Gyan Satyagraha — knowledge non-violent resistance — to describe the open-access movement in India. For years he purchased Indian books from second-hand bookstores, shipped them to the United States for digitisation, and placed them on the Internet Archive; he made available all 100 volumes of Gandhi's Complete Works, along with the works of Nehru, Ambedkar, Tagore, and other independence-era figures. He wrote about his engagement with India in the book Code Swaraj, co-authored with Sam Pitroda, which has been translated into nine Indian languages and is available free of charge. Public Resource, with support from the Arcadia Fund, established formal Memoranda of Cooperation with the Indian Academy of Sciences, the JC Bose Trust, and the National Centre for Biological Sciences; made 18,471 Indian Standards (public safety codes) freely available online; and worked with Indian Kanoon founder Sushant Sinha on open-source OCR tools for Indian-language scripts.

Around 2019, Malamud partnered with Bengaluru technologist Omshivaprakash H L to transform what had been a largely remote scanning effort into a community-based ground operation in India. Together they co-founded Servants of Knowledge (SoK), named as a deliberate tribute to Gopal Krishna Gokhale's Servants of India Society. Malamud funds the initiative through Public Resource and its Arcadia Fund grants; Omshivaprakash manages India operations. The partnership has built a scanning infrastructure that by 2024 processed approximately 1.4 million pages per month across Bengaluru, with partnerships spanning the National Law School of India University, Gandhi Bhavan, Azim Premji University, Hampi Kannada University, Motilal Banarsidass, and many others. The SoK collection on the Internet Archive has passed 100,000 digitised titles and 500 million views. Malamud has also co-launched the Servants of Knowledge Academy, offering free training in copyright, archiving, scanner design, and OCR to librarians and volunteers across India.

Honours and Recognition

2022 Internet Archive Hero Award

Internet Archive — for relentless work making information available to digital learners worldwide

Berkman Award

Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University

Pioneer Award

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Bill Farr Award

First Amendment Coalition

Internet Hero Award

Internet Archive

Writing

Malamud is the author of nine books, ranging from his early Exploring the Internet — a travelogue of the early net that was partly written on a houseboat in Srinagar — to A World's Fair for the Global Village (foreword by the Dalai Lama) to Code Swaraj (with Sam Pitroda). All of his books on India-related topics are available free of charge and without rights reserved on the Internet Archive. He is widely quoted on the relationship between democracy and public access to information.

Current Activities

Malamud continues to lead Public.Resource.Org from Sebastopol, California, operating with a grant from the Arcadia Fund and individual donations, working with a team of approximately 18 people on contract and a dozen pro bono law firms. In India, he remains deeply engaged with the Servants of Knowledge initiative — participating in public events at venues including the Gandhi Bhavan, the Bangalore Literature Festival (where SoK demonstrated live scanning to festival visitors in 2023), and Bangalore International Centre — and with the ongoing expansion of the SoK Academy. He describes the goal plainly: to keep scanning, keep making materials available to people, and to treat access to knowledge as the foundational act of democratic citizenship. His rallying cry in India is Jai Hind! Jai Gyan!