States that try this should have their sovereignty revoked and revert to a territory under jurisdiction of the federal government.
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I sometimes need the electrical ones.
I cannot afford them. I have to obtain them âby alternative meansâ.
They should be free to access. Pay-per-play when you have to use them for playing sucks (well, strictly said you donât HAVE to, but itâs sometimes worth to have a rough idea how to play safe (though for that purpose a Australian code will work plusminus as well as European one, the underlying physics is the same; just avoid the US ones as they are too profit-friendly and somewhat unsafe in comparison). Spend the money saved by such âstealingâ on better materials and thicker wires for added safety.
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Which is the job of the government, and while it is often contracted out to private organizations, it is fundamentally the governments job, and the government works for the people.
Need is irrelevant. It is the law, and it belongs to the people. But as long as you asked, I have looked up codes regularly when dealing with engineers and contractors doing a renovation on our office.
Like public.resource.org?
Because it is the job of the government to create and provide this information, and the obligations of its citizens to follow them. It is the highest possible imperative that access to these laws which we are required to follow not be restricted in any way, and that trumps any other possible concern of any sort, including cost to the taxpayers or the financial concerns of private companies that make money off of it. If the government is unable or unwilling to provide this it is not a legitimate government and has no right to exist. It is simple as that.
As near as I can tell, the âannotateâ laws of the state of georga are the authoritative laws and are published by the state as the official laws. Ergo, they must have no restrictions on public use, distribution, or reproduction.
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Glad to see it! Clearly it is possible to have open standards that are supported by both government and the institutions that benefit from standardization.
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I would be shocked if any government profited on these standards. I think they merely try to mitigate their out-of-pocket.
By all means, go ahead and tell your state governments that youâd like them to raise taxes so the building codes can be free for all. Or get your stateâs professional associations to raise licensing fees, or however it would work. Perhaps you can get them sponsored by Coca-Cola, in Georgia.
By the way, this isnât just building codes, not that that matters. This is the entirety of the law of the state of georgia. So this includes the bits about not murdering and stealing. Also, luckily I donât have to go lobby the state to not violate the most important principle of a democracy. It is already legally established that any legitimate law must be free from copyright provision.
And the concept that someone should have to lobby for this is absurd. This is overthrow the government level stuff.
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Some things are worth paying for. And some things canât be kept from public access, otherwise youâre restricting the freedom of we simple plebs to follow the law when we actually want to do something on our own.
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They should be public domain anyway!
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It wasnât just a copy of the laws, it was an annotated copy of the laws. They arenât suing over the laws at all, theyâre suing over the annotations, synopses, and references included in both the original and the version Malamund is distributing. Techdirt and BoingBoing didnât have to read the whole court document to figure that out, itâs right there on page 2. There is absolutely nowhere in the document where the state is making a claim about owning the copyright on the laws themselves.
As a non-profit scholarly publisher who is currently working on an English translation of Albertus Magnusâ De Animalibus, comprised of 26 books, where tract one of book one alone has 1,038 footnotes, Iâm kind of sympathetic. A lot of hard work is being put into those notes by scholars whoâve prepared their entire careers to tackle this project, and it creates a massively complex manuscript that âwith the help of some previous work by the Johns Hopkins University Pressâmy editors have to edit, and my production department needs to typeset and design. The translation wouldnât be anywhere near as valuable without all of that work. Likewise, somebody(ies)'s expertise gave significantly more context and meaning to that annotated version of Georgiaâs state laws, and publishing professionals set it into print in a way that make it significantly more digestible, and they deserve to be compensated for that work. At least I think so. It would be a very different story if Malamud just posted the laws, but he didnât, and that isnât at all what heâs being sued for. The request for an injunction is embedded in the Techdirt post that Cory cites, go read it for yourself. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150723/17125231743/state-georgia-sues-carl-malamud-copyright-infringement-publishing-states-own-laws.shtml Heâs being sued over the value that was added to the compendium of laws.
As for whether or not the state of Georgia should simply suck it up and pay for those annotations themselves, in a democracy that decision should be made by the duly elected officials, not Mr. Malamud. I think they should, but I donât live in Georgia so it doesnât really matter what I think. I donât get a vote.
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BZMacLachlan is absolutely right. I used to work at West (now called Thomson Reuters) and there are actual humans (huge armies of them, on the 2nd-4th floors IIRC) writing these annotations, not government employees. The annotations do include lists of relevant cases, but also lots of other stuff like links to other relevant statutes, commentary on historical changes to the relevant laws, links to relevant laws/cases in other jurisdictions, explanatory text about various issues within the law, links into a taxonomy of legal concepts, and basically everything else that someone interested in that statute would want to know (if the Attorney Editors do a good job). The scope is different for every publication (i.e. every state or district or appeals court or regulatory body or whatever) but thatâs the basic idea.
It bothers me that every article about or by Carl Malamud seems to intentionally imply that âthe lawâ includes these other works. Yeah, itâs true that if you really want to understand the law, you need to know the stuff in the annotations too - because surprise surprise, when a government passes a law they donât also write a big treatise on it to help you understand it. They can barely get the letter of the law written most of the time, and personally I wouldnât trust most politicians to also tell me what the laws really mean. So someone else has to do that part.
To be clear, I do find it problematic that the most thorough treatments of our nationâs laws are usually out of the reach of most of its citizens, behind a paywall of some kind. My favored solution would be a concentrated Wikipedia-like crowdsourced effort, though - donât put Westlaw out of business by stealing their shit and publishing crappy copies of it, put them out of business [or more likely, just make them change their business model] by building a superior product to what they offer.
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so the gubmint is outsourcing the annotating to West or whoever rather than doing it themselves. why does West get to keep the copyright? instead of passing the cost of annotating on to people buying it on a case-by-case basis, shouldnât our laws be freely available to all citizens and the state just paying West (or whoever) to annotate it out of the taxes in the first place?
this seems like pork to me.
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Before you overthrow the government you might at least want to run a Google search first.
Go ahead, Google âgeorgia statutesâ and youâll wind up at http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/georgia.html , where Georgia publishes not only all their laws, but also their appeals court opinions, for you to read for free. Spend 20 seconds and you can find the no-murder and no-stealing laws youâre talking about.
Itâs not West, itâs LexusNexus. And they donât own the copyright to the annotations, itâs a work for hire arrangement giving the state the copyright to the annotations. The state is suing, not the publisher.
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Well then, the stateâs committing fraud, since it canât legally hold copyright on anything.
From the actual injunction:
âPlaintiff does not assert copyright in the O.C.G.A. statutory text itself since the laws of Georgia are and should be free to the public. The Code Publishing Contract between LexisNexis and the State of Georgia requires that LexisNexis publish on the internet, free of charge, the statutory text of the O.C.G.A. These free Code publications are available 24 hours each day, 7 days a week, and include all statutory text and numbering; numbers of titles, chapters, articles, parts, and subparts; captions and headings; and history lines. The free Code publications are fully searchable, and the catchlines, captions and headings are accessible by links from the table of contents. The free Code publication of the State of Georgia is accessible via a website link found on the State of Georgia website www.legis.ga.gov.â
Since when? Citation please?
Iâll have to go digging through Techdirt. I canât say that I have a cite off the top of my head, but Iâm pretty certain that the consensus at least was that itâs impossible for the government to even hold copyright on a work, since itâs not a legal person, unlike a corporation or a human being.
Iâll be back with the results of my search.
It looks like the case law says that a state indeed can hold copyright on something it did. Which is fucking perverse in my opinion.
This site (https://www.usa.gov/government-works) explains how at least government works can have copyrighted elements. But Iâm not convinced itâs relevant to this case, as this is work for hire, and Georgia probably shouldnât be allowed to own a copyright for a work it commissioned and payed for in entirety. Itâs not like theyâre borrowing pieces here. If the government pays for a piece of work to be done, that work needs to be public domain. Not just publicly accessible.
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From Info/Law:
Although Section 105
of the Copyright Act places the works of federal government employees
(so, federal statutes, federal judicial opinions, and the like) in the
public domain, Section 105 doesnât apply to state laws. Does that mean
state laws are copyrightable? Although the statute is silent, the courts
have always said: no, they arenât. In Nash v. Lathrop,
6 N.E. 559, 560 (Mass. 1886), the court rested this conclusion on the
unfairness of limiting publicâs access to the rules that governed its
conduct:
Every citizen is presumed to know the law thus declared,
and it needs no argument to show that justice requires that all should
have free access to the opinions, and that it is against sound public
policy to prevent this, or to suppress and keep from the earliest
knowledge of the public the statutes, or the decisions and opinions of
the justices. ⌠It can hardly be contended that it would be within the
constitutional power of the legislature to enact that the statutes and
opinions should not be made known to the public. It is its duty to
provide for promulgating them; while it has the power to pass reasonable
and wholesome laws regulating the mode of promulgating them, so as to
give accuracy and authority to them.
This principle was relied on in many early copyright cases to
preclude private compilers of state laws from asserting copyright in the
statutes. See Howell v. Miller, 91 F. 129,
137 (6th Cir. 1898) (the âgeneral proposition cannot be doubtedâ that
âno one can obtain the exclusive right to publish the laws of a stateâ;
there can be âno ground of complaintâ against a party who merely
reproduces âthe general laws of Michigan as therein printedâ in the
official code books); Davidson v. Wheelock, 27 F. 61,
62 (C.C.D. Minn. 1866) (state statutes âare open to the world. They are
public records, subject to inspection by every one âŚ. They may be
digested or compiled by any one, and it is true such compilation may be
so original as to entitle the author to a copyright on account of the
skill and judgment displayed in the combination and analysis; but such
compiler could obtain no copyright for the publication of the laws only;
neither could the legislature confer any such exclusive privilege upon
him.â).
The Supreme Court took this principle and ran with it, ruling in a
number of early cases that judicial opinions (by analogy to statutes)
were uncopyrightable subject matter. See Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. 591, 668 (1834); Banks v. Manchester,
128 U.S. 244, 253 (1888) (âThe whole work done by the judges
constitutes the authentic exposition and interpretation of the law,
which, binding every citizen, is free for publication to all, whether it
is a declaration of unwritten law or an interpretation of a
constitution or a statute.â). The Fifth Circuit succinctly summarized
this history by remarking that ââthe law,â whether it has its source in
judicial opinions or statutes, ordinances or regulations, is not subject
to federal copyright law.â Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Intâl, Inc., 293 F.3d 791, 800 (5th Cir. 2002) (en banc).
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It should also be noted that the state of Georgia didnât call what Malamud did terrorism. If you read the injunction youâll see that they note that Malamud calls what heâs doing terrorism.
From section 19 of the injunction, on page 11:
âDefendantâs founder and president, Carl Malamud, has indicated that this type of strategy has been a successful form of âterrorismâ that he has employed in the past to force government entities to publish documents on Malamudâs terms. See Exhibit 2.â
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