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City Laws Only Available Via $200 License
MrLint writes "The City of Schenectady has decided that their laws are copyrighted, and that you cannot know them without paying for an 'exclusive license' for $200. This is not a first — Oregon has claimed publishing of laws online is a copyright violation." This case is nuanced. The city has contracted with a private company to convert and encode its laws so they can be made available on the Web for free. While the company works on this project, it considers the electronic versions of the laws its property and offers a CD version, bundled with its software, for $200. The man who requested a copy of the laws plans to appeal.
I wonder how the 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' standpoint would be upheld given that you may not be economically able to know the laws...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Ignorance of law is not a defense in a court of law, yet people are subject to laws they cannot read in detail. Doesn't seem very nuanced. It seems a very straightforward violation of basic principles of civics.
Any law which does not offer universal access to those claimed to be subject to it should not have universal jurisdiction over said population. A very simple quid pro quo. If you have to pay to know the law, it only can be applied to those who paid :).
TFA reports that the code is available in multiple public locations. The citizen can make copies of the ordinances from those sources.
That the city code is a twisted mess is no big surprise. A lot of municipalities have that problem.
The assertion of copyright is stupid, just stupid. The morons will soon realize that they have to retreat from that lunatic undemocratic position or they will be sued under New York's FOIA.
I don't doubt that there are a fair few superfluous laws on the books(in that city, and generally), and that unnecessary complexity is a major vice; but I suspect that most of the actual thickness is contributed by things like building codes.
Even in a hypothetical libertarian utopia where the state handles nothing but defense and the bare outlines of criminal law, you are going to end up with some very lengthy laws, either directly or by reference. For instance, "due process" is pithy; but what it actually means, once you get to the level of court procedure, access to lawyers, details of how one can/cannot be detained and under what circumstances, etc, etc. would be hard to encapsulate in under book length. You could keep the law code itself short by simply refusing to go into detail and handwaving, or by referring to outside codes of practice; but that doesn't really help. If you do the first, you don't really have a rule of law at all. If you do the second, you simply have a very long code of laws that is split up among numerous documents, with your actual "law code" serving as little more than an index.
Once you get into the realm of things like building codes, which are necessarily pretty technical, this problem just becomes greater.
This is not to say that complexity is good(it isn't, one should always strive for Einstein's "simple as possible; but no simpler"); but it does mean that you have to be careful to distinguish between unnecessary and invidious complexity, and necessary complexity. It's like the use of technical jargon. People complain, often rightly, that it is used to confuse and intimidate laymen and keep them from questioning experts; but there are plenty of things that are simply complex and cannot be usefully simplified without distortion.