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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.
"The Primary Purpose of Copyright Law is not to Provide a Benefit to Authors, But to Provide the Public With Access to Authors' Works."
Fascinating, isn't it?
More than fascinating... anyone who follows yro.slashdot or any copywright laws could pull some very helpful court decisions from this one statement alone. Heck, it sort of infers that P2P is legal, especially with copywrighted works. Obviously, that wouldn't stand up in another case, but it's very interesting nevertheless.
Imagine if it hadn't passed.
Ignorance would have to be an acceptable defence.
It would allow lawyers to rambus the legal system.
Seinfeld described lawyers as those annoying people that actually read the back of the box for the odd rules in the game. Imagine if they could now cut out parts of the rules and hide them.
I didn't see this quote in the decision or the analysis, but if I'm to assume it's there then I also would assume that the argument runs in the vein of deciding that no public interest is served by copyrighting laws or restricting their distribution. However, in the case of a copyrighted work, the argument for restricting distribution - at least temporarily - is that the resulting market advantage gives authors incentive to produce works. So I'd be surprised to see this applied to p2p networks (though as someone opposed to intellectual property in general, I'd be delighted. :)
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
(I posted this story a week ago and it was rejected.)
I'm surprised that copyrighted laws are news to so many people. I've been frustrated for years that while you can look up almost all of our local munciple code on line, the building code sections are not published, because they incorporate by reference material copyrighted by the standards organizations. Check your own local code websites and I bet you'll find the same thing.
This odd situation isn't new; this has been standard practice for years. But nobody really noticed until we came to expect instant internet access to government information, since all local governments have copies of the copyrighted building codes available for inspection in the office.
There are some interesting implications of this ruling for software; for example, if a government agency requires software to interoperate with a proprietary standard (e.g., Word document format)....
Good afternoon,
I am writing to inform you the web page listed in the subject line is completely illegible unless using Internet Explorer, as the text of the page is confined to a narrow column only a few words wide, with wide blank spaces on either side. A quick look at the source for the page reveals that the text has on both sides columns where the width is set to 720 pixels. As a programmer and web developer, I understand the difficulty in developing web pages for more than one browser, but your home pages contains the following description of your organization:
GTW Associates is an International standards and trade policy consultancy with expertise in the strategic role of standards in competitiveness of businesses, organizations and countries in the global marketplace.
Although I did not find specific references to W3, HTML 4.0, or other technical standards and specifications on the site, the lack of compliance with other web-browsers seems to undercut your qualifications. (As a side note, the page was apparently updated last on "June 3065.") I would very much like to be able to read your site with Opera or Mozilla.
Thank you for your time,
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Copyright is not automatic. One must actually bother to make the effort of providing notices that this work is your intellectual property. Until then the work is considered in the public domain. In the majority of situations involving copyrighted works being included in laws, you are able to provide that information as a public service so long as you mention who the owner of the work being included is.
read my blog
musings on politics and technol
Surely it has a right to some recompense (even if only a reimbursement of reasonable costs) for its input?
Well, aside from getting illegal kickbacks from the industries who benefit from the laws like any other public servant, I don't see where you'd say they have a "right" (read: entitlement) to some benefits of the law. Why would they, isn't good faith participation in the public sector reward enough? If they're so concerned about their standards being used without compensation, then they can sue to keep their standards out of the law and let the standards stay private. You can't have your greed and spread it, too.
The court said that the SBCCI (here's a nudge to actually read the article so you can spell things correctly) specifically comes up with templates to be used as laws. Laws can't be copyrighted, even if the law incorporates copyrighted references. So - and this is covered in some of the transcripts - the SBCCI seems to have chosen a business model incompatible with the internet, and it's just that nobody cared to look laws up in places other than City Hall or the library that this didn't come up before. Huzzah for Mr. Veeck.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
I think you make some excellent points. IAAL, and I find that areas I do not have familiarity with are incomprehensible at first. When I start to dig into them, there is usually a fair amount of good sense behind them. There are, of course, exceptions, but these are generally far and few between.
Trial procedures in my state, for instance, are governed by the state Rules of Civil Procedure with some local rules in effect county by county. They seem like water to a fish to me now -- I barely notice them. Before, I was drowning in them.
I suspect that programmers find new languages to be similar -- there are some familiar general principles, but certain ways of doing things seem alien at first. After some experience is gained with them, the libraries and syntax seem to make much more sense.
Similarly, you tend to learn languages that you need to know (or, in the context of networking, you learn about the platforms you need to use/support).
Sometimes it sounds to me as though people who whine about the complexity of the law are making criticisms that are just as legitimate as those made by a lawyer would make if he complained to a group of programmers about how GCC sucks and is hard to use as compared to other compilers. Admittedly, everyone is affected by the law (in different ways), but I think it is extremely unrealistic to expect that it is possible in the complex society in which we live for "the law" to be familiar and accessible to everyone.
We don't expect complex applications or medical technology to be understandable by everyone, and I think it is silly to expect that things as disparate as tax law, securities regulation, civil procedure, and insurance law to be reduced to such simple terms that the average person who reads nothing more challenging that Time can put his arms around everything encompassed by the statutory and regulatory laws we live under.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
SBCCI may have put work and thought into those codes... but I suspect that their motive wasn't an altruistic urge to help humanity by helping government. Perhaps their motive was to make oodles of cash by selling copies of the code.
I think that SBCCI, and the other building-code organizations, thought they had the ultimate legal monopoly. By convincing municipalities to enact building codes that amount to "see SBCCI's code," they'd retain the copyright and soak every Joe Handyman that wanted to repair a light switch.
I tried to get a copy of my local building codes recently, before putting new shingles on the roof. Although the building inspector was helpful in telling me what I needed to know, I wanted to see the whole text of the law.
I went to my library. They don't have a copy; it's a small town and they can't afford it. There's several different model codes, each costing exorbitant sums, and they change every two or three years.
I tried to get a copy from another state library. It seems that there's two copies of the code I need in the state; both of those copies are "reference" and can't leave their libraries.
I could go down to the Building Inspector's office and photocopy the code. That'd take a long time, cost a lot, and if the codes were copyrighted it'd be illegal.
How am I to comply with the building codes when I make repairs? As others have pointed out, I could be fined or even jailed for failure to comply.
Before this ruling, my choice would have to be: cough up the dough to the extortionists.
Thankfully, this ruling eliminates that copyright, and hopefully the codes will show up online soon. Perhaps low-cost paperback editions will come out.
Perhaps, too, towns will have to do some work of their own to create these codes, instead of accepting model codes that were created in hopes of a cash windfall. I know it will be tough, but I'm sure that the towns can work together, and work with other organizations, such as Underwriters' Laboratories, to develop "open source model codes" that can be used by many towns.
What I am saying is that this is the way these laws have been developed; the existing trade-off allowed goverments to adopt as law very high quality building codes, electrical codes, etc., at almost no cost.
If this had not been the case, then goverments would have had to spend a lot of money to commission specialists to write these codes for them. I am not saying whether I feel that society is better or worse for not having spent that money, simply that the situation has changed now, and I am curious to see what will happen the next time these newly public domain laws are up for review.
Living better through chemicals