Information the Government Holds: Open Data, Public Records, and the Rights in Facts Anyone Can Request
By Casey Scott McKay ·
Public data feels free and frequently is not, and the ways in which it is not are unintuitive. Federal government works are outside copyright by statute, but material produced by contractors, licensed in from third parties, or generated by state and local bodies may not be. Portals impose terms of use that operate as contracts regardless of the underlying copyright position. Records requests produce material with its own restrictions attached. This article works through what is actually in the public domain, what only looks like it, the contract layer that governs most access in practice, the derived product question that determines whether a business built on public data owns anything, and the attribution obligations that quietly propagate through the supply chain.
IP and Technology > General IP | Article | Published 14 March 2026 - Updated 13 April 2026 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us
Summary. Public data feels free and frequently is not, and the ways in which it is not are unintuitive. Federal government works are outside copyright by statute, but material produced by contractors, licensed in from third parties, or generated by state and local bodies may not be. Portals impose terms of use that operate as contracts regardless of the underlying copyright position. This article works through what is actually in the public domain, what only looks like it, the contract layer that governs most access in practice, the derived product question that determines whether a business built on public data owns anything, and the attribution obligations that propagate through the supply chain.
Keywords: open data · public records · federal government works · section 105 copyright · state government copyright · edicts of government · contractor-produced data · database rights · terms of use on portals · attribution and share-alike · derived products · records requests · bulk data access · scraping public sites · government data licences
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