Open Source Law

Russ Nelson writes "The U.S. Supreme Court just announced its refusal to review the 5th Circuit's en banc decision that there can be no copyright of privately authored laws offered to U.S. governmental bodies for adoption. The model law itself may be copyrighted, but once it's adopted, the law must be open source. The entire case is laid out on Peter Veeck's page." Slashdot touched on this before, but never really covered this dispute in depth. Here's a nice legal summary of the case.

Comments

Enact Linux

[sleepingsquirrel]

Someone should slip the source code for Linux in one of those mamoth appropriation bills Congress passes right before the end of session. Since the lawmakers never read the bills they vote on, and law becomes uncopyrightable *presto* no more SCO problems.

Open sourcing isn't the issue

[Bingo Foo]

The problem is that they won't allow anonymous CVS commits.

This is Socialism at its worst

[Anonymous Coward]

How can the government justify taking away the property rights of the corporations that write our laws?

Without private ownership of our laws, what incentive will there be for corporations to write innovative new laws? Now that there is no way for businesses to make money writing laws, our nation's lawmaking process is going to wither up and die.

Lemme guess.

[Anonymous Coward]

You use a Mac, don't you. I could tell by your pathetic, self righteous, holier than thou, attitude.

Re:Referenced article

[leshert]

Works
fine
in
IE.

Still,
as
a
Mozilla
user,
I
was
disappoin ted.

Re:Here's an interesting quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Sarchasm: a pit stupid people blunder into while trying to use sarcasm.

Re:Misuse of "Open Source"

[zulux]

s/open source/in the public domain/g

For you MSCEs out there

Menu Bar -> Edit -> Search & Replace -> Search For: Open Source -> Replace With: in the public domain -> "It looks like your Searching and Replacing" -> Right clicn, Hide Asistant -> Start from Begining on Document -> Ok -> Ok -> Ok -> Ok -> Ok -> Ok -> Ok