Downloading for Democracy

outragedmoderates.org is featured in a Wired article today. The site is run by Thad Anderson, a second-year student at St. John's Law School. Thad has aggregated more than 600 government and court documents and made them available for download through P2P networks:

Anderson didn't intend to make a statement by using P2P networks, but his use of the networks to deliver the data counters the usual government and entertainment industry arguments that P2P networks have no value, apart from stealing copyright works, and therefore should be outlawed.

In this case, the P2P networks are promoting public knowledge and doing so in a way that makes it easy for people to obtain all related documents swiftly with a single mouseclick.

Although all of the documents on Anderson's site are available elsewhere, they are buried deep in government and court sites or scattered among the sites of various government watchdog groups and media outlets. It took Anderson about four hours and 2,000 mouseclicks to download more than 13,000 documents related to Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force from the National Resources Defense Council's website and from Judicial Watch. But a visitor to Anderson's site can download a folder containing all of these documents in a few minutes with a couple of mouseclicks.

see also: Ernest Miller vets the piece and isn't too impressed with outragedmoderates.org.

081204 update: OutragedModerates.org is now hosting a bit torrent of their Download for Democracy project.