Slashdot Mirror
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 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)....
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.