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

Link renders bad on Mozilla?

[SoCalChris]

I'm using the latest milestone of Firebird, and the entire article rendered about an inch wide, with several inches of whitespace on the sides. Anyone else get it this way?

http://www.gtwassociates.com/answers/veeck.htm

Re:Link renders bad on Mozilla?

[afidel]

The W3C has a ton of online resources linked from their learning CSS page Here

Why?

[!3ren]

What I want to know is why someone would want to copyright a law.
I can't see any method of generating income or royalty unless say the laws had to be licensed per year or something.
Also, if a copyright was held on a law, would this allow the copyright holders to upgrade the law without the knowledge of the client? (DMCA v1.0 has been upgraded to DMCA v1.1, all cd's must be bought again to ensure validity)
Just wondering...

How to do <font size="+1"> in CSS

[yerricde]

I do use the tag sometimes when I'm dashing off a quick/temporary hand-coded HTML fragment, especially with relative size like size="+1" which is not easily indicated with CSS.

To give you an idea: Replace all instances of <font size="+1">...</font> with <big>...</big>, which is semantically equivalent. (Likewise, there's a <small>...</small> inline element as well.) Or in CSS, use <span style="font-size:120%">...</span>. It may appear longer at first, but once it's CSS, you can bind it to a class.