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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.
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!
But has the idea of copyrighting a legal code ever been tested by the SCOTUS? And if the decision was unfavorable, do we have to buy the text from iTunes now?
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.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
There are some things that reasonably can be ascribed the quality of being a worthy candidate for ridicule.
Certainly the notion that a representative democracy would copyright its laws and attempt to control their distribution for profit or any other motive is worthy of ridicule.
AFAIK the motivation is almost always financial, usually in collusion with some big legal publisher who gets exclusive rights and kicks back to the state. But it's not hard to imagine some kind of conspiratorial intent to restrict information to protect the legal class or bury details.
About the only rationale that makes any sense is to try to maintain an official reference presentation. The state could actually format and print a small run of the code and annotations themselves, which anyone could copy, but that would probably be a non-trivial amount of overhead, so they outsource it to a publisher in exchange for exclusivity.
Can the US federal government, or any state level government force you to buy stuff? If not, the law + annotations must either be free, or ignorance is actually a valid excuse.
The Court ruled in Banks v Manchester that case law cannot be copyrighted. The ruling was that writings by a government official, acting in their official capacity, are owned by the public and cannot have copyright protection. That case also brought up a question relevant to this case. Under federal law citizens and residents may hold copyright. Georgia is probably neither, and therefore arguably cannot hold copyright.
In the Banks case, the state had contracted with someone else to produce indexes, etc. The deal was that if the company wrote these extra pieces, they would have copyright protectionfor a couple of years - they didn't get paid to write them, but were allowed exclusive right to sell their version with indexes, etc. The indexes and such were the original work of that citizen. That original work, but not the law itself, could be copyright the author.The finding in this Georgia case may hinge on who wrote the annotations. If government officials wrote them, it's public domain. If a private company wrote the annotations in order to sell them, they may be allowed to do so. HOWEVER, the fact that the STATE is suing indicates the state claims copyright for themselves, and the state will probably lose.
Also, the Court will probably want the law to be accessible, so they'll likely find some logic to rule against the state. Consider the Obamacare care case. The court ruled that the IRS "penalty" for not having insurance is a tax, and therefore within the powers granted to the feds, while also ruling is NOT a tax, and therefore didn't have to originate in the house of representatives. So in the very same ruling they said "it's a tax ... it's not a tax". Translation: we don't want to go head to head with the Obama administration on this one. They sometimes FIND a way to rule whichever way they want to rule, whether of makes any sense or not.
Note to editors: the article has been updated to strike out part of the that you have quoted in TFS. You should probably update that as well.
So, the annotations are not part of the law. They are comments about the manner in which the law was applied in certain cases, no?
Devil's Advocate...while yes, you can't copyright the law, are you saying you can't copyright things written about the law? How about textbooks used by law schools?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Lets start by clearing something up. The GA legislature creates and passes the statutes - the actual law. The text of the statute is not subject to copyright. The lawsuit does not address the text of the statute. Courts issue decisions interpreting and applying the law. Neither statutes nor court decisions are subject to copyright.
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. Lawyers use the annotations as clues to which cases to go read to beter undertand the tricky bits of a statute. Annotations are not written by the couts and not written by the legislature. Annotations are not the law, are not controlling and are not persuasive.
Courts do not cite to the annotations. Lawyers do not quote the annotations in their briefs and motions to the courts. Simply does not happen, since the annotation is not important except as a finding tool, as a way to figure which court decisions are relevant to the legal issue you are researching.
If you read the lawsuit - the state did not create the annotations, a legal publisher did. LexisNexis is one of the two major legal publishers. Apparently, at least part of the annotations are created by LexisNexis as works for hire, under contract from the state. I'd guess that there are annotations not covered by the contract as well, and that LexisNexis could easily bring its own suit.
To claim that copyright on the annotations is preventing people from seeing / knowing what the law is simply silly. The annotations are NOT the law, but a mere finding aid, and the annotated code is available at no charge. One of the links in the original story takes you directly to the LexisNexis website where you can read, without charge, the annotated statute. Far from impeding public access, GA has taken the enlightened step of making the annotated code available oline in a very useable form at no cost to anyone who wants to go look. In most states the statute itself is available, but to get to an annotated version you have to use a lawyers database service, which charges a subscription fee.
For Cops, Ignorance of the Law Is an Excuse
http://www.vnews.com/opinion/1...
Brought to you by SCOTUS, lapdogs of jackbooted persons throughout Murica.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Obamacare did originate in the House as HR 3590. (HR meaning House of Representatives.) It was a "shell bill" that was gutted and stuffed with Obamacare to get around the rule. It's not a novel approach either, and the courts took no issue with it.
HR 3590 passed the House first as required, went to the Senate which altered it into Obamacare and then congress "resolved the differences" between the House and Senate versions passed before sending it to the president.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/...
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.
You could also not buy the car, then you don't need the insurance. It's really no different from requiring manufacturers to build in seatbelts. Ultimately you're buying them with the car and thus are "required" to buy seatbelts. Of course you could also not buy the car and thereby not be required to buy seatbelts.
Unless I misread the summary, or it is wrong, Carl Malamud is not being sued for publishing Georgia laws, as it states you can do that freely. He's being sued for publishing annotations on Georgia laws that he copied from elsewhere.
Let's use car insurance as an example; something you are required by law to buy.
Millions of New Yorkers and other urban dwellers disagree with you. No one is required to own a car.
For Cops, Ignorance of the Law Is an Excuse
http://www.vnews.com/opinion/1...
Brought to you by SCOTUS, lapdogs of jackbooted persons throughout Murica.
They are allowed to speed, wear guns in places that don't allow guns, etc., so why shouldn't they also be allowed to not know the law? If they don't have to obey it, they don't really need to know it. Well, other than to apply it to other people.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You could not use a car. That may be uncomfortable to you and probably cost you your job, but it's not strictly a requirement for you to have a car.
On the other hand, I cannot simply opt out of the law. By the very definition of a law I cannot.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
If a private company wrote the annotations in order to sell them, they may be allowed to do so. HOWEVER, the fact that the STATE is suing indicates the state claims copyright for themselves, and the state will probably lose.
The filing itself (as linked to in the techdirt article) says:
The copyrighted annotations include analysis and guidance that are added to the O.C.G.A. by a third party publisher of the O.C.G.A. as a work for hire.
So, yes, Georgia is claiming ownership of the copyright by the state, not the 3rd party author.
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
The problem with that logic is that, if it is Constitutionally valid, the Constitutional provision requiring tax laws to originate in the House is meaningless. If that provisions is meaningless, why did the Framers include it?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
Louis D. Brandeis
When will we see another like him?
By the way, Timothy McVeigh used this quote to justify his heinous deed. My prediction is that we are going to see more and more "domestic terrorism", and not the Islamic kind. This is the result of government contempt for the people and the law.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
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.
Parent post has veered about 45 degrees off topic.
No one is saying the Georgia laws are under copyright. As with all government publications, those laws are in public domain.
Georgia is saying that a specific set of annotations is under copyright. That may or may not be true-- if the annotations were written by someone who was hired as an agent of Georgia's government, they were produced by that government and there is no copyright. They are public domain. Otherwise there is a copyright, but Georgia does not own it and has no standing to sue for copyright infringement.
However Georgia can file suit even knowing that it cannot win, but with the expectation that the defendant will fold out of court rather deal with the costs of a legal fight. This is an abuse of the courts but it is a very common one and unless some white knight jumps in, Georgia will win by bullying. Or if Georgia politicians get enough flack about this, they might muzzle their legal beagles.
Will
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.
Georgia law is constructively withheld from the public. It is available for free in only one form, the online lexis-nexus search at http://www.lexisnexis.com/hott.... This search page is deliberately contrived so that you can never view more than a small fragment of text at a time. There is no way to obtain PDFs, and the search engine itself is deliberately crippled to hobble searches unless you already know the phraseology of the law involved.
As an example, try to find the "stop and identify" law for Georgia using the lexis search. Unless you already know it's part of the "loitering" statute, you will have to page through hundreds of search results to find the relevant text.
At a minimum, the State of Georgia should be forced to provide full PDF downloads of the Georgia code. More importantly, though, the annotations themselves are effectively part of the law, as they are universally cited in case law (which is simlarly hobbled with RIDICULOUS copyright restrictions) which legally interprets the code and establishes its legal meaning.
So yes, the entire Georgia code, with annotations, needs to be made freely available to the public, as are annotated codes are in most states.
He is publishing the "Official Code of Georgia", published under the "Authority of the State of Georgia". Either the annotations are an essential and/or official part of Georgia law, in which case they should not be copyrighted, or they are a convenient additional aid for lawyers, in which case they shouldn't be part of the "Official Code of Georgia" "Published Under Authority of the State of Georgia" and published separately and given no special preference to any other private publication.
Under your logic, the State of Georgia could publish its laws in a made up language and then have a copyright on the information necessary to decode the language. That clearly isn't the intent of our laws.
Yes, and that is a good solution. For a state to partner with a private firm and publish a mix of free and commercial stuff as an official publication is wrong. What's even more wrong is that the state attempts to enforce the private copyright.
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
Why not crowd source the annotations, indexing, online publishing?
I was wondering... What are these "annotations"?
Are they creative interpretations of the law written by a third party? (probably copyright eligible but odd to have a third party creatively interpreting the law and having that used by the courts)
- Are they "indexes" (as some have stated)? (probably not copyright eligible since no "creative" work done)
- Are they "case law examples"? (probably not copyright eligible since these cases would be a product of the court system and therefore not copyright eligible)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Please keep in mind that I find it insane that the government can hide the law from its citizens; to have a free society the law has to be equal for everyone, and this more than anything else puts a divide between the haves and the have-nots.
I'll just leave this here.
"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
If they are summaries of cases, they probably could be considered creative works and eligible for copyright. However, if they are being used by the courts to decide cases, we would have the odd situation where a private party was writing law... and if they were then considered "law" then probably not eligible for copyright.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
States are NOT restricted from holding copyright in general (only the federal government is). There are some exceptions to this, but they probably don't apply here.
On the face of it this seems like a perfectly legitimate complaint on the part of the state. The state is expected to assume the cost of producing the laws themselves (that's why we pay legislative salaries), and making those things freely available in order to enforce them, but the indexing, research, and reference work involved in creating an annotated version costs money and isn't guaranteed to be done by statute, meaning that it could be covered by copyright and the state is reasonably justified in attempting to recover those costs. There are of course many complexities here (although almost all of them will be found in Georgia law itself, and have nothing to do with the federal constitution), but the suit is far less unreasonable than the poorly researched editorial "reporting" it.
Oh please quit with that "artists" bullshit, it has been shown time and time again to be right up there with "job creators" on the horseshit meter!
Why not tell that to meatloaf who had to file bankruptcy in the 80s because the record company had the 50 foot brass balls to say Bat Out Of Hell I, an album that to this day holds the record for longest time on the top 200, didn't make a dime and so owed him NOTHING. Tell that to Cheap Trick who is STILL suing last I checked because the record company said "Hey downloads didn't exist when you recorded your albums...sucks to be you bitches!" and thus for every iTunes sale they get NOTHING. The exact same is true for movies and TV, which is where the phrase Hollywood Accounting comes from. Tell that to Don Dokken, whose first Dokken album (which he recorded on his own dime) sold nearly a quarter million only to get told by the record company "that's great now you only owe us half a million dollars for 'promotional expenses', tough break" and thus gave the band NOTHING.
The current copyright system HARMS the artist, as it allows rich old white fucks to become the eternal gatekeepers by making endless bank on back catalogs which the artists don't see a fucking cent of in a good 90% of the cases. Oh and you might want to ask the Stones how much they get on all their classic albums, which with current copyright laws won't go into public domain until after your grandkids are dead...did you say "not a single cent"? Then you are correct because according to Keith Richards they haven't gotten a penny from their 60s albums since the mid 70s...wanna guess where all those profits from all those classic albums went? If you said "the pockets of rich old white fucks that didn't have shit to do with actually creating it" then you are actually learning, congrats.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
How do you quantify resemblance?
There's nothing unconstitutional about what happened. Maybe you'd like to amend the Constitution to make some parts of it unconstitutional - maybe even some of those amendments would be ok if they were practical and enforcable, but your attempt to portray yourself a defending the Constitution here against assailants is ridiculous - you just don't like the way our system works. Which is fine, it's just the posing that's off.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Because the courts appear to use the annotated version for making decisions...and if your crowdsourced annotated version was the same as the other annotated version it would violate copyright.
FWIW, if the courts use the annotated version to make decisions, IMNSOH opinion, it should be considered the effective law, and therefore not copyrightable.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So, what you are saying is that the Framers of the Constitution placed a provision in it which they knew meant nothing?
In the case of the ACA, the bill passed out of the Senate contained NONE of the language which was in the bill passed out of the House which it supposedly amended...not only that but it did not even contain any language relating to what the House bill was about.
You are correct that I do not like how our system works...and neither would the men who wrote the Constitution, nor would the men who ratified the Constitution in the 13 states. If they imagined that it would be interpreted as it currently is, they would not have ratified it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
KGill,
You are incorrect. On January 1st of every year in Georgia, including 2015, hundreds of new laws take effect. These make up the current year's code,mel@becknet.com which is then update again on July 1 with additional new laws. The library's have outdated codes, and a quick survey of several municipal libraries found none with code books newer than 2011, so libraries are not even updated annually. Ironically, the libraries I spoke with said only the lexis site has the current code. At least they knew their business. Unlike many commenters in this thread.
I'll say it again: Georgia's state government has conspired with Lexis to keep practical access to Georgia law out of the hands of the public. Their motive is clearly to force people to purchase the Lexis product. Practical access includes full electronic text in a single corpus, to permit anyone to search and index with their own tools, plus the annotations, which encompass essential indexes and case references in addition to abstracts. The government could easily publish the law directly as PDFs, complete with indexes and case references, excluding the useless analysis. But that would not serve political cronyism. The so-called creative copyrightable abstracts are a red herring the devious device to force copyright between the public access to the law.
The sad thing is, Georgia is lawmakers have sold the legal legacy that belongs to the people for a song to a single commercial entity. It's truly a travesty, and one that many other states have avoided. So why doesn't Georgia?
Wow, that's quite a leap of judgement. With or without copyright, the publishers/distributors would still screw over the artists because they have a monopoly or at least they used to and artists have little common sense. Copyright law makes it a lot harder to screw artists, not harm them. And the days of eating 80-90% revenue by labels for content sales are over.
Internet distributors like Apple, Amazon and Spotify typically take only a 30% cut from sales. Heck, if they did their own advertising and branding, they could get 100%, screw the middlemen, just like Tesla is trying to get rid of dealers for its cars to maximize its profits.
I do not believe that access to the free law libraries is actually encoded in the laws as a right, at least not at the federal level. I certainly believe it is encoded in the spirit of the law ...
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said, "if a law isn't public, it isn't a law."
Nope. You're just documenting your own failure to understand how our kind of legal system works.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.