India, Dec. 15 -- Carl Malamud, a prolific campaigner of liberating information, has a simple modus operandi: always have a proof of concept - and skin in the game.

"When I see a member of the US Congress, and we're talking about PACER (the Public Access to Court Electronic Records repository), it isn't like I'm just some thinktank saying PACER should be free. I've got some skin in the game. I took 20 million pages of PACER and put them online. Same thing with the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). It was not like I was just saying Indian standards should be free. I posted 19,000 standards online. So I put myself at risk and I understood the government might come after me. They didn't [because it was] non-commercial use," says the 64-year...