[Lamplighter]

Washington Post
Andrea Peterson
December 20,2013

This FBI agent had a boneheaded plan to copyright a secret interrogation manual

<snip>The author of a sensitive FBI interrogation manual submitted the document for copyright protection
-- in the process, making it available to anyone with a card for the Library of Congress to read.<snip>

First is that the American Civil Liberties Union fought a legal battle with the FBI over access to documents just like this
… But the copy they released to the ACLU was heavily redacted --
unlike the 70-plus page version of the manual Baumann reviewed at the Library of Congress.
<snip> For instance, the full version includes a sentence that says
the manual is intended for the FBI's "clean" teams
-- the investigators charged with collecting information for use in federal prosecutions.
"That raises the question of whether teams collecting information that's not for use in federal courts
would have to follow the manual's (already permissive) guidelines at all," says Baumann.

And second, the manual almost certainly shouldn't even qualify for a copyright because it is a government work.
Anything "prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government
as part of that person's official duties" is not subject to copyright in the United States.
And yet, according to Baumann, the author of the manual deposited a version
of the interrogation manual dated 2008 with the U.S. Copyright Office in 2010.