One Man's Quest to Make Information Free

Commission that he wanted to put the agency’s filings online. “I just don’t think people who use the Internet are going to be interested in this stuff,” Malamud remembers the official saying in 1993. Malamud bought all the filings and put them online anyway, using a computer borrowed from his friend Eric Schmidt. (Yes, that Eric Schmidt.) About a year later, he took them down. That prompted more than 17,000 day traders, investment clubs, and business school professors to beg the agency for free Web access to its records. You might know it today as the SEC’s “Edgar” database.