[Asparagirl]

They do. I’ve seen the contracts, and even the RFP’s that led to the contracts. It’s illegal.

They will sometimes make a free gateway portal to those records, where you input your in-state zipcode to get access, or some other nonsense like that. But they actually have the gall to say in their contracts that the digital files cannot be redistributed by the (public, taxpayer-funded) state or local archive. Funny, the state law says they can’t do that…

And so the non-profit I founded and run is starting to reclaim those public records, for the public, for free.

[tomcam]

https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/

Excellent website and a great cause. I just donated.

[JaimeThompson]

If you can please link to the non-profit here, I think a lot of us would enjoy it.

[Asparagirl]

It’s in my HN bio, but here you go ;-)

https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/

[JaimeThompson]

Thanks! Honestly I should have checked first but we can pretend that we did it for (rolls d20) SEO!

Looks very nice BTW.