Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/11/rettspraksis-no.html
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I guess Gorsuch GARLAND didn’t make it onto Norway’s court, either.
[Edit to fix idiot Gorsuch/Garland mistake]
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With any luck the appeals judge will understand the difference between a CD-ROM and a series of tubes. The judge who ruled against Rettspraksis.no probably still thinks the fax machine is futuristic technology.
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I really don’t understand what’s happening here. I get that a publisher of curated and annotated legal texts can have a case for copyright claims, but as I understand it, that’s not what Lovdata does. It really seems to boil down to the judge’s ignorance.
But another problem lies with Lovdata, apparently: according to what I got from an automated translation of the Norwegian Wikipedia page on Lovdata, its operations must be self-financed, which doesn’t make much sense for such an organization, but makes some of its actions a bit more understandable.
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Brief summary from your link:
Jointly owned by Ministry of Justice and the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo. Not a profit making enterprise, but meant to be financially “self sustaining”. Offers some information for free (not specified) but a subscription service meant for professional users such as lawyers offers more sophisticated search functions etc.
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I hope / assume this simply reflects that judges are as capable as anyone else of doing a huge fuckup. As long as it’s quickly resolved on appeal, and the original judge apologises to his victim, then it’s all fine.
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I find this sort of thing insane.
It seems to me that the public domain documents (especially legal ones) should be available to all for any purpose.
Annotated and curated legal texts I suppose that makes a certain kind of sense and seems reasonable to support companies like Lovdata on a commercial basis. However, publishing laws, legal decisions etc. in a usable format (with search tools) should be provided by the government and funded through taxes. i.e. Funded by those who the laws are created by and for.
If anyone has a legal copyright case wouldn’t it be the producers of the library’s CD-ROMs?
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