It’s certainly an asymmetric warfare form that brings results.
More of the same, please.
1 Like
Unfortunately I doubt the results will be the public funding of open annotations. They are much more likely to be the financial ruining of Mr. Malamud. Fortunately the laws themselves are already freely available online and this is unlikely to change that.
1 Like
They need current law so they can enforce the law and people can know their rights and what is proper conduct under the law. If taxpayers are subject to the law they have to be enformed of the law.
love it
Aren’t these private companies being paid by the state? i.e. the taxpayers? Does all that work not then belong to the taxpayer already?
1 Like
That’s not actually true. Work created by federal government employees as part of their job is generally not copyrightable but the government can buy and own copyrights to works created by private individuals or corporations.
I read here that Malamud was being sued for allegedly pirating the DIN standards in Germany. What happened in that case?
I think there’s an interesting question in that neither legal judgements nor statues can be copyrighted, so then can an index between statutes and their corresponding key/precedent cases be copyrighted? To the extent that the annotation is a list of facts “case X involved a judgement on law Y”, it wouldn’t be copyrightable. Seems like Mamud is running a high risk strategy for finding out what really is copyrightable, by forcing the courts to rule on his actions.
The trouble is that he basically runs a one man operation. If the service he’s attempting to provide is to be useful, he’d need to update the (pirated) annotated and re-keyed statutes forever. There’s too much of a volume of court judgements and too many states, too many standards incorporated by reference for one man or even a small team to keep current and authorative, even if they spend their full time making copies of the official or preexisting references. What happens if someone relies on an out of date copy? How useful is a snapshot of the annotated statutes that is one year or two years out of date?
In fact there’s nothing to prevent people creating “alternate annotations” to the Georgia state laws, by reading the original non-copyrightable judgements that exist in the public domain, and independently cross referencing them to the corresponding parts of the Georgia statute. Doing that might even be useful - new cases might be noticed that aren’t in the existing annotations. Perhaps it’s a task that would yield naturally to text recognition and natural language processing and could be automated. If this was the work that Malamud engaged in, he wouldn’t be receiving court summonses.
At the moment, according to the complaint, he’s allegedly plagiarising the work of others who have put in the effort to identify which cases correspond to which parts of the statute, and is misrepresenting what is copyrighted under the dubious slogan that the law is being hidden from the citizen behind paywalls.
The end-game is presumably to induce Georgia to change how it provides access to statutes and annotations; Malamud is saying - “look how much better we could make access to case law.” … In which case his tactics are pretty perverse and risky. 20% crackpot, 50% visionary, 30% terrible negotiator.
I’m curious to see what will happen.
ETA: Malamud apparently lost his case in Germany and faces court fines of up to €1.5M and two years in jail if he fails to cease and desist and if DIN presses for enforcement.
The argument from the German court is that it costs a lot to compile the DIN codes, and they’re only of practical benefit to engineering professionals. The public can view the codes for free in 109 libraries throughout Germany, and the German government doesn’t want to provide a subsidy to the engineering industry by fully underwriting the cost of the DIN code maintenance. The costs of the case are jointly on DIN and Malamud. I wonder what happens if he loses his appeal?
And West would NEVER farcical copyright claims in an attempt to put a paywall around public domain material…Like say claiming copyright in page numbers http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/West-Loses-Copyright-Claim-over-Page-Numbers-17947.asp
Please don’t install any “ring circuits” in the U.S. Nobody doing work later would have any idea that there were two live connections between the outlet and the breaker panel. The physics is the same, but practices are sometimes far different.
That’s why you always test if the circuit is live before touching it, even after switching it off. That is why you may like to short the powered-off circuit in case something powers it on again while you have hands in it. You cannot rely on the things being proper - even with sticking to local specs the tech can make a honest mistake that slips through testing due to a freak accident.
And never trust anything. I got a nasty shock when I trusted the Chinaman to use brown for live and blue for neutral in a power cord, and few years later expected the left pin to be L and the right one N and not vice versa. I still can feel the smoke flowing out of my ears.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
