Techdirt. Stories about "usps" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories about "usps"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 1 Apr 2010 02:04:17 PDT Can The USPS Really Restrict What You Do With Photographs Of WPA Murals? Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100304/0429328412.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100304/0429328412.shtml Joshua Weinberg points us to a question from Rick Prelinger, questioning why the US Postal Service restricts photography of the New Deal/WPA murals that it owns. As the USPS website notes, it owns over 1,000 murals that were all commissioned by the Treasury Department between the years of 1934 and 1943. You would think, therefore, they should be in the public domain. Not quite. While you can take photos, the USPS says that photos may only be low resolution, meaning "a maximum of 72 dpi and no larger than a four-by-five-inch output to end use." It has some other rules about not causing a disruption in Post Office facilities, which makes perfect sense, but it's difficult to see how the other rule makes sense. I can also understand if the goal was preservation (no flash, etc.), but not restrictions on how the images can be used. The US gov't does not own the copyright on these works, and thus it seems like they should be in the public domain. Given the USPS's own recent troubles over someone else claiming copyright on an image used in a USPS stamp, you would think they would be sensitive to these sorts of things.

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]]> public-domain? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100304/0429328412 Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:06:00 PDT The US Postal Service's Business Model Is Outdated. Is It Time To Wind It Down Or Privatize It? Dennis Yang http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100312/0044308530.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100312/0044308530.shtml discussed whether or not ceasing Saturday delivery was a good idea for the USPS. John Potter, the US Postmaster General, recently said that the postal service's business model is as outdated as the newspaper industry's. Potter said:
"Twenty years ago we would laugh at the notion that a newspaper would ever embrace the idea that maybe the channel of the future is electronic and that you may have to change your business model,"
Sure, similarities between the industries definitely exist. Craigslist is a much cheaper and more efficient marketplace for local goods than the classifieds section in the newspaper ever was, and email is a much cheaper and more efficient means of communication than snail mail. That said, whereas for the newspaper industry, delivering a daily, physical newspaper to households may actually be an endangered business, the business itself of delivering physical items to households is still very much in demand. After all, with so much shopping happening online nowadays, someone still has to deliver the goods (until replicators, a la Star Trek, are perfected). In fact, for over a decade now, we've been talking about this opportunity to optimize the "last mile," and as of yet, nobody has really even come close to solving this problem.

That said, the USPS is a government institution, and even though it does not take any tax funding to run, an attempt to attack this opportunity may best be mounted by the private sector (like UPS and FedEx), especially when you consider the USPS's projected $238 billion shortfall for the upcoming decade. So, since it's not a private business, the best solution for the USPS may be to simply accept its diminishing role in the daily lives of Americans, and focus on continuing to run as efficiently as possible for as long as it remains useful. That said, the other solution may be to remove the government-mandated monopoly and privatize the USPS, and then let that private entity decide whether or not to invest in the business. Either way, it seems silly to ask taxpayers to invest anything further in the USPS since so many alternatives exist already. We should definitely all be appreciative of the part that the Postal Service has played in the foundation of our country, but what else can be done?

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