Carl may feel like a lone wolf in the US, however, much of the same battle is going on in the EU with its Open Data directive and efforts by individual governments.

The main principle is a bit different from Carl’s “the law should be public”, because in the EU, the EU-wide standards are much more available for free online and the local countries’ standards are frequently available for free in their respective National libraries (think, local Library of Congress).

The emphasis instead is that all information creation that was funded by taxpayers must be available for free to them, and in a form that is useful for secondary use. This is more of the case for various government-gathered and processed information, but still it overlaps with standards often enough.

One of the best initiatives for this has been UK OpenData initiative https://data.gov.uk/