The committee wishes to emphasize, however, with respect to data collection and dissemination activities funded substantially with government monies or performed under contract, careful attention should be paid to assuring that the purpose of the funding or contract was to achieve a government purpose or fulfill a government obligation. The exclusion in Section 1404 (a) should not serve as a means of depriving non-government suppliers of information products and services vital to the operations of government of the incentive to create, maintain and organize such collections of information. Rather, the purpose of Section 1404 (a) is to provide increased opportunities and incentives for the public--including value-added publishers--to seek greater access to the collections of information that government entities within the Untied States and its Territories gather, organize or maintain either directly or through clear and specific non-exclusive arrangements with contractors or recipients of government funds. For example, the American Medical Association's (``AMA'') ``Physician's Current Procedural Terminology'' (``CPT'') is a compilation of over 7000 numeric codes with associated descriptions for the reporting of the wide diversity of procedures performed by physicians and other health care providers. The CPT medical code was first published in 1966 to meet the needs of physicians and industry to accurately report medical procedures, and the AMA continues to spend millions of dollars in the organization and maintenance of the CPT medical code. The AMA sells CPT books to the public including physicians, insurance companies and others, and licenses numerous types of users including hospitals and commercial software vendors to use CPT in various electronic media including use over the Internet. In 1983, the AMA granted the Health Care Financing Administration a royalty free license to use CPT in its Medicare, Medicaid and related programs. The AMA also licenses many other types of government users including state worker's compensation agencies, the National Library of Medicine, the Department of Defense and the Veteran's Administration. CPT data is gathered, organized and maintained for purposes other than those for which government agencies contract with AMA to fulfill a government obligation, including international use through license. In addition, when government agencies publish the CPT medical code, they make it clear that extraction and redistribution of the information is subject to the terms and conditions established by AMA with its contracts with those agencies. Clearly, government itself would incur enormous costs to gather, organize and maintain the same type of database, and a general public good is served by the arrangement between AMA and government for general availability, with reasonable limitations, of the CPT medical code. It is precisely this type of arrangement which the committee intends to encourage in the future and does not believe that simply because agencies use nongovernment collections of information to fulfill a governmental purpose or obligation should remove the protections for such collections that would otherwise be afforded under Section 1402. Similarly, many nongovernment owners of collections of information license use of their products and services to government agencies for limited internal use. Such was the case with the Justice Retrieval and Inquiry System (``JURIS'') provided under contract to the Department of Justice by West Publishing Company from 1983 until 1997. Although the collection of information was provided under contract to ``achieve a government purpose,'' the agreement between the Department and West stipulated that access to and distribution of the collection of information was limited. Although certain potential competitors of West sought to have JURIS made publicly available under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. 552, the courts have ruled that the terms of the contract between the government and the owner of the collection of information allowed the agency to properly deny a request to make JURIS generally available, because JURIS did not qualify as agency records and therefore was exempt from disclosure under provisions of 5 U.S.C. 552(a)(4)(B). See Tax Analysts v. United States Dept. of Justice , 913 F. Supp. 599 (D.C. Cir. 1997), aff'd , 107 F.3d 923 (D.D.C. 1996). Thus, despite the fact that the AMA's CPT is subject to a contract with government agencies to ``fulfill a government obligation as established by law or regulation,'' the exclusion in Section 1404(a) is not meant to reach these types of arrangements. In determining what the governmental purpose behind a contract governing collections of information, courts should rely heavily on the agreement between the government and the nongovernment party. Statutes tend to give broad authority to enforce laws to agencies, but it is in the contract where the motivation for such agreements is most readily revealed. It should be noted that language added by the committee at mark-up insures patient rights in confidential medical information (Sec. 1405(h)). With this added protection, H.R. 354 would neither prohibit patients from accessing their own medical records, nor does the bill change current law on privacy of medical information and would not authorize any entity to gather and disseminate confidential medical information or records. The language added by the committee was done so specifically for this purpose. Furthermore, this committee does not intend for this legislation to effect any state laws and pending federal legislation that serve to protect confidential medical information and records of patients. The Act can only lay the groundwork for increasing access to government collections of information. Government entities must undertake the considerable tasks of assuring that publicly funded data and facts are made available without restriction, and ensuring that government information is stored and archived. The evolution of digital technologies, including advances in software capabilities and the reach of the Internet, should ease government costs and labor of gathering, providing and maintaining collections of information. The same should hold true for the functions of storage and archiving, whether the cost efficiencies associated with technology ease the burden of government itself or those of libraries, universities and research institutions to continue acting as repositories for government collections of information. Finally, this section recognizes that non-government providers of government information may invest substantial monetary or other resources in gathering, organizing collections of information to which they have added value or which may be incidental to any such activity funded by the government. Any product or service in which such investment occurs outside a contractual or agency relationship with the government remains protected under this Act, even if it contains a government collection of information, in whole or in part, subject to the complete defense herein. In this manner, non-government entities will be encouraged to make government collections of information more widely available and in a greater number of formats than government itself may be able to achieve with the use of limited taxpayer funds. Likewise, any Federal of State educational institution can protect its collections of information when it is engaging in education or scholarship, thereby providing further incentive to these organizations to create, maintain and organize useful collections of information.