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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.
The agenda may be that if ignorance of the law is no excuse, access to the law as it is interpreted by the courts should be free.
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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 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