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Georgia Lawmakers Sue Carl Malamud For Publishing Georgia Law
TechDirt reports that the state of Georgia is unhappy enough with Carl Malamud for publishing the state's own laws that it's sued Malamud for doing so. From the article:
The specific issue here is that while the basic Georgia legal code is available to the public, the state charges a lot of money for the "Official Code of Georgia Annotated." The distinction here is fairly important -- but it's worth noting that the courts will regularly rely on the annotations in the official code, which more or less makes them a part of the law itself.
The article uses the word "ridiculous" only 10 times; they're taking it easy on the poor legislators.
Come on. What is this crap? The article should use "ridiculous" exactly 0 times. "Ridiculous" is an extremely subjective word. Thus it shouldn't be used by any sort of a journalist or article writer, except when quoting what somebody else said or wrote.
When the submitter and editor saw that the word "ridiculous" was used so many times, that should have been a clue that maybe, just maybe, the article has an agenda to push and that should disqualify it from being linked to from the Slashdot front page!
I don't expect much from Slashdot these days, but this is just fucking pathetic, even by Slashdot's exceedingly low standards.
In my opinion, if you can not freely access a law, then it should not apply to you. Apparently ignorance of the law is no defence either.
The law and the state exist entirely to serve the people and make civilisation function. Law makers repeatedly forget that it does not exist to benefit them.
Oh well, tax me silly and bully my peers, we all die some day. Long live neo-feudalism!
What the lawsuit focuses on are the ANNOTATIONS. The annotations are short topical summaries that briefly explain what a court said about the statute. An annotation is written by someone who works for a publisher, after reading a court case.
This case may very well hinge upon "who wrote them?". If as you say, written by someone who works for a publisher, that publisher would hold copyright (on those annotations alone!) and would be the party going to court.
But it seems it's the state going to court here. Which means it's the state believing it holds copyright here. Read: state employee(s) writing those annotations. In which case this lawsuit would be a non-starter, regardless of whether those annotations are deemed essential for understanding the law.
Or a (private) 3rd party wrote them for the state, read: "tax dollars at work to produce those annotations". Which imho is effectively the same as a state employee doing the writing.
Not if the annotations are the work of an entity required to give up all its copyright protections or otherwise prohibited from such enforcement of their copyrights
Which may be the case here, as it is the work of the state of Georgia.
My take-away from this is that the indexes and annotations may be subject to copyright by the private party that wrote them-- but from my experience working as a VA employer on policy and procedure manuals, with some indirect experience in handling material that was produced by contract workers, this would depend on the wording of the contract between the government and the private party. In most of those contracts the author is hired as an agent of the government and his relationship to his product is the same as that of any government worker to their assigned tasks, which means he cannot claim copyright and the work is in the public domain. There are major benefits to being an agent of the government and that is usually how this kind of thing is done.
That said, I don't see how Georgia could win this lawsuit, since if the material is copyrightable, the author, and not Georgia, would hold copyright and Georgia would have no standing in the matter. If the author was working as an agent of Georgia, then the work produced is in the public domain, and there is no valid copyright.
In either case the suit seems like a frivolous one, since if there is any copyright involved, Georgia cannot be the party that owns it.
Of course the defending party would be facing legal expenses to just get the case dismissed, and Georgia might be using that as a club to get an early out-of-court settlement. There is a term for legal battery but I don't recall it (coming up on my 10th year of retirement), and that is what Georgia might be attempting with this. Filing suit, even when you know that you cannot win in court but you think you could get an early out of court settlement, should be considered a breach of a lawyer's duty as an officer of the court. Lawyers who do this should be penalized, and in some cases disbarred. But that doesn't happen. That part of the legal system is totally broken.
Will
Largely, I expect, because that was the principle in effect in the British Parliament. It's a common feature of most, if not all, bicameral legislative assemblies, and it dates back to that division of powers between the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Britain. The problem comes from the fact that the US Senate is elected, and thus it gains the democratic legitimacy to significantly tamper with bills. It's a debate being had in Canada right now, where we're trying to decide whether to reform or abolish our Senate. The fear up here is that an elected Senate (Canada's Senators are appointed by the Governor General in the name of the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister) would become like the US Senate, a competitor to the lower house, and that the supervisory role would be abandoned. Even in the UK the Lords' tendency to try to overrule the House of Commons reached the point where the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 were pushed through and give the Government an override power at second reading so the Lords cannot block a bill.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If this was 20 years ago, I wouldn't bat an eye at the idea that the Government would need to charge for their 'annotated' copy of the laws -- because it would have to be physically printed in paper books. But this isn't 20 years ago, this is 2015, and we have these convenient, near-magical devices called computers, and more to the point, .pdf files, which make the cost of 'publishing' such a reference work near zero, and the cost of updating it also, relatively speaking, near zero. To claim anything else in this day and age is just bald-faced profiteering. Get correct, Government.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The rational behind starting tax bills in the HR is that it's "closer to the electorate" - or was before Senators were elected by popular vote. Now, the differences between the two as far as being held to the will of the people is lessened.
This is just my worthless opinion but I feel the 17th Amendment should be repealed because ever since the 17th Amendment was ratified the state legislatures no longer have any voice in the federal government and now the whole system is grossly out of balance and state's rights are being slowly eroded into a unitary state. The people are already represented in the House of Representatives which makes a senate elected via the populace just redundant.
The problem comes from the fact that the US Senate is elected,
No, the problem comes from the fact that the U.S. government no longer considers itself bound to follow the Constitution. The rest of your post indicates what causes this problem. The legitimacy of the various parts of the U.S. government to do ANYTHING is supposed to come from the U.S. Constitution, not from "democratic legitimacy". The various states yielded their sovereignty to the federal government under the understanding that the federal government would be constrained by the Constitution, not free to do anything which was not opposed by the democratically expressed will of the people..
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison