Slashdot Mirror
Professor Posts "Illegal Copy" of Guide To Oregon Public Record Laws
An anonymous reader writes "Copyright law has previously been used by some states to try to prevent people from passing around copies of their own government's laws. But in a new level of meta-absurdity, the attorney general of Oregon is claiming copyright over a state-produced guide to using public-records laws. That isn't sitting well with one frequent user of the laws, who has posted a copy of the guide to his website and is daring the AG to respond. The AG, who previously pledged to improve responses to public-records requests, has not responded yet." The challenger here is University of Oregon Professor Bill Harbaugh.
How can the law which every citizen expected to comply with be allowed to exist under Copyright? How can keeping us from copying the law possibly be an advancement of the sciences and useful arts? Once it becomes law it is no longer a creative work and is now a fact, a fact which is by its very nature that which least deserves to be kept from the public.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
passive-aggressive
Or you could call it civil disobedience. He is deliberately calling out the AG so he can hopefully win without the trouble, time, and expense of a court fight.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
You are welcome to lobby Congress to incorporate that radical provision into copyright law, but I don't think its going to fly. If you restrict it to those when "created by a public entity", you might have a tiny bit better luck, as without that your proposal would deny copyright to privately written legal texts, etc. (Anyhow, rather than exceptions to copyright to the work based on its "implied use", why wouldn't you just create an exception to the exclusive rights of copyright based on the actual use as, essentially, an extension to the existing Fair Use rule? That seems to me to be more sensible.)
But, at any rate, that's not the law as it stands, so even granting (for the sake of argument only) that your proposal ought to be the law, it isn't the law, and so isn't a convincing argument for why this work would be outside the scope of copyright under the law today.
Usually, you don't have standing to challenge a claim of copyright in court unless (these are illustrative rather than exhaustive):
(1) You are the actual creator of the work, and the claim of copyright is itself therefore an actionable violation of your rights, or
(2) The purported copyright holder is suing you for violating the copyright, and you are interposing the invalidity of the copyright as a reason you shouldn't be held liable.
"Someone else made a bogus claim of a legal right" is not, generally, itself a cause of action on which you can prevail in court. If it were, the courts would be even more clogged than they are now.
What you call the "passive-aggressive" route -- violating a right that someone claims they have and challenging them to enforce it -- is a common way of challenging a legal claim, since it puts the person making the claim in the position of publicly backing down or filing a suit in which you can challenge the validity of the claim.