The &quot;them&quot; in the sentence you quoted refers to &quot;the original public records&quot;.<p>The locks you refer to were around the <i>new</i>, value-added work: the digitized, processed, cataloged version of the papers they had made by adding value to the original public-domain documents. The locks were not applied to the original documents.<p>It&#x27;s like the difference between storing a touched-up version you made of an Apollo 11 photo in a vault, and stealing the original photo negative from NASA and putting <i>that</i> in a vault.