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Publish Georgia's State Laws, You'll Get Sued For Copyright and Lose (arstechnica.com)
Presto Vivace writes: If you want to read the official laws of the state of Georgia, it will cost you more than $1,000. Open-records activist Carl Malamud bought a hard copy, and it cost him $1,207.02 after shipping and taxes. A copy on CD was $1,259.41. The "good" news for Georgia residents is that they'll only have to pay $385.94 to buy a printed set from LexisNexis. Malamud thinks reading the law shouldn't cost anything. So a few years back, he scanned a copy of the state of Georgia's official laws, known as the Official Georgia Code Annotated, or OCGA. Malamud made USB drives with two copies on them, one scanned copy and another encoded in XML format. On May 30, 2013, Malamud sent the USB drives to the Georgia speaker of the House, David Ralson, and the state's legislative counsel, as well as other prominent Georgia lawyers and policymakers. Now, the case has concluded with U.S. District Judge Richard Story having published an opinion (PDF) that sides with the state of Georgia. The judge disagreed with Malamud's argument that the OCGA can't be copyrighted and also said Malamud's copying of the laws is not fair use. "The Copyright Act itself specifically lists 'annotations' in the works entitled to copyright protection," writes Story. "Defendant admits that annotations in an unofficial code would be copyrightable."
Slashdot reader Presto Vivace adds: "It could have been worse, at least he was not criminally charged liked Aaron Schwartz."
Slashdot reader Presto Vivace adds: "It could have been worse, at least he was not criminally charged liked Aaron Schwartz."
But do I have to obey laws that I cannot see?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That would appear to be in violation of Georga's Open Records Act.
http://legal.gatech.edu/sites/...
Copyrighting annotations is fine as long as they are truly commentary and have no legal force.
If they do have any legal force, then that's a whole different story.
Isn't the issue over the ANNOTATIONS and not the laws?
What am I missing?
Maybe the state made it impossible to get a copy of the laws without the annotations?
The official Georgia Code is the copyrighted code with the annotations. Anything without the annotations is unofficial.
The link works fine for me ...Georgia law is also available for free at the Library of Congress website [loc.gov].
It links back to the same source. In any case the official version of legislation is, almost by definition, not "also available" elsewhere.
Fake news and garbage journalism, designed to manufacture outrage and generate clicks, rather than inform.
The claim being made is that the official version (i.e. the law) is the annotated version and that consequently you cannot freely access the actual legislation, such as it would be proper to rely on in court. Is that claim untrue?
Additionally, were the claim true, there would also be the serious issue, raised by the promoted comment of ip_what to TFA, that this outsources to an un-elected and non-public body, and exclusive right to change the face of the official legislation of the state. Which would be rather worrying.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke