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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."
also Aaron Schwartz is a criminal.
Slashdot reader Presto Vivace adds: "It could have been worse, at least he was not criminally charged liked Aaron Schwartz."
Aaron Schwartz is a sad case, but what does that have to do with copyrighting public law?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
But do I have to obey laws that I cannot see?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia
That's the night that they hung an innocent man
Well Don't trust your soul to no back woods Southern lawyer
Cause the judge in the town's got bloodstains on his hands
Your tax dollars at work. Par for the course when it comes to government.
Isn't the issue over the ANNOTATIONS and not the laws?
What am I missing?
you have a ruling class, you just don't like to acknowledge them. You'll never get rid of them ( wealth and privilege gains you entry and you're not getting rid of that any time soon) but there's a lot more you could do to reign them in if you'd stop pretending they don't exist.
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...you can still view them online for free. Granted, it's through LexisNexis, but it's free and searchable, so what's the big deal?
That would appear to be in violation of Georga's Open Records Act.
http://legal.gatech.edu/sites/...
wasn't he? I don't see the connection.
Beowulf is in the public domain, I can make as many copies of it as I want and re-distribute that to anyone I want.
But, if somebody publishes a copy of Beowulf marked up with annotations and explanations (and copyrights the derivative work), obviously I can't republish that. That's what we're talking about here, right?
Laws are in the public domain, but they aren't GPLed.
I am sorry, but I really don't understand this.
Laws should be free for anyone to read. They're public.
With that being said, the attached cost might not be defined as "it'll cost you this much to read the set of laws" but as "it'll cost you this much tor read the laws in this particular format". Now the question becomes "are there free alternatives to this data set?"
Analogy: I could take Dante's "Inferno" and publish it as an illustrated interactive electronic format book, with 3D animations and comments and bells and whistles and sell it for a thousand dollars a piece - not because the standard content costs a thing, but because I put X amount of work into it, and the work itself is copyrighted, e.g. the extra content.
In this case, copying that product and distributing it for free is copyright infringement.
I had written all the above without clicking on any TFS URLs, but now I did. And it looks like LexisNexis, the publisher, is a private corporation. So this is not a matter of data (aka the set of laws) not being available otherwise. It's a matter of that particular set of data (annotated laws) having been copied without the publisher's consent, which is copyright infringement.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
It's not the laws that are copyrighted. It's the annotations which you need to really understand what the laws mean and how they apply. That's what's been copyrighted.
Why are we picking on GA? I know my state has put people in prison for criminal infractions in the late 80s when I was in law school for giving students copies of pages from law books.
i fail to see how that's better/more defensible?
Does any other state do this, and if so what legal standing does GA have to copyright the laws it passes?
Corollary question (and no, this is not a begged question): given that ignorance of the law is no excuse, is it constitutional to enforce laws that require a $1000 purchase to read?
Available online, for free, in all its glory: http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/Default.asp
Law should not be subject to copyright, and this person should not be sued for simply making a copy of the law he's subject to. But to say one cannot read the law at all without paying $1000 is just plain incorrect.
So their casual users are shut out of the "game".
It takes no money at all to put the prepared docs into PDF or similar open formats and distribute them. The IEEE also gets away with this madness as well.
I DO acknowledge that it takes money to assemble and maintain docs, and that's what member and especially VENDOR members (who bought and paid for the standards to begin with) need to do if they want their standards to be openly acknowledged.
This is a publisher's racket, just like academic and college books and papers. Someone needs to let the air out of the balloon.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Distributed copies of any state code are obsolete the next day the legislature is in session. When you want to know if you can legally do X, there has to be an official site where the current code is available.
Well, the standards often just have some tiny editorial changes from the last drafts, and the last drafts are available, so that works sort of OK.
Great, care to point out where those laws are available freely WITHOUT those annotations?
They are simply being used as a vector to allow copyright to be exercised on public information.
Its exactly like adding a copyright page to the front of a public document, and claiming that page is copyright, therefore the whole document is.
The fact is that a public of 'public servants' dont want the general public to have free access to the laws that govern them, and are willling to
spend the publics money to protect the public from knowing their own laws.
Nice, isnt it.
Well, it's complicated. Some of the annotations are things like trade secrets and such from contractors contributing to and being referenced by construction bills and are very much copyrightable.
I suppose the state could setup a fund and provide copies of the annotated laws for free to citizens of the state and pay the copyright holders out of the fund. Depending on demand that might not be too workable.
Certainly lawmakers have ready and free access to the laws (because they MADE them). How do they get the laws for their own legal use? How do lawyers and judges get them? Do they each have a paid subscription to LexisNexis? The PUBLIC wants to know!
will last all of 5 minutes against a modern military. And as long as that military is fed and taken care of they'll turn on the citizens who are starving in the streets instead of joining them. They always have in over 5000 years of recorded history.
So yeah, sorry. It's a threat. And an empty one at that.
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and honestly didn't work the last time. The French revolution was a mess and an almost complete failure. Sure, lots of the ruling class died, but they were just replaced by a different and potentially worse ruling class. Things didn't get better for the peasantry until two world wars killed enough of them that they were in demand for labor. And our current ruling class is busy rolling back those gains in the guise of protecting us from terrorism...
You're gonna have a ruling class. Always. Accept it and move on and start asking how you can mitigate the damage they do.
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A local lawyer bucked the rules on it and posted all the state laws on their website for all to see. A couple of years of many of the other lawyers in the state trying to force them to shut down that part of their website and the state relented. Now the State of Alaska has them posted in a searchable database on the official state website.
Yeah, Lexis Nexis is a major "go to" source.
Uhm, no. The annotations are by Lexis Nexis. The laws are written by legislative staffers, the Uniform Law Commission of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) and the American Law Institute, and other authors.
last I checked they killed one (unimportant) General who was being careless in Afghanistan. Nobody who mattered was killed in 'Nam. If you never get to touch the ruling class you're just blowing smoke. Go live in the mountains and every now and then come down and blow up a school bus. Congrats, you've just accomplished all you're going to with violence. But outside of those (middle class or poor) school kids you blew up (or maybe shot with guns) you've done squat. Well, not squat. Your actions will be used to cement the ruling classes power when they get "Tough on Terror".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Many of the laws were enacted over 95 years ago; 95 years used to be the length of copyright in the USA. So: what can stop anyone from publishing the old laws ? Part of this story centers on "annotations", these are: recent case law; legal opinion; ... that are needed to help understand the laws. Some annotations will be out of copyright, others will still be in copyright. In order to know what ''the law'' is in Georgia you need to be able to read recent laws and recent annotations. It would, however, to be interesting to publish the out of copyright stuff and see what the state says about that.
If the facts of the case really match what I've just read, then there is something fundamentally wrong. The text of any law has been produced by public servants, and if we leave out any suspicion of corruption, they are paid for by the tax payers; already for that reason should the text of any law be in the public domain. On top of that, how can you claim to have a society under the rule of law, if that law isn't easily accessible to any member of society? Secret laws don't belong in any society - we can't follow the rules if we aren't allowed to know them. The text of all laws should be available to download on freely accessible web servers. I may remember wrong, but I think even China does that.
Well, when it comes to music copyright, the "owner" of songs has been known to be changed for money. So if the state says the laws are copyrighted does that mean that the copyright can be purchased?
So, would buying them and then charging the sate for every use of them be a way to profit?
Utah doesn't, it's code is available online from a utah.gov url. No need to go to a third party source. They are kept up to date with the changes made each year by the legislature. And no copyrights markings on the Utah Code Annotated http://www.le.state.ut.us/Documents/code_const.htm
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
I see only a brief mention of the fact he is appealing in the Ars Technica article. But I'd like to know how I could send him a few bucks.
District court decisions like this are often overturned when they reach the appeals level, with judges who aren't quite so mired in local interests. /P
Does any other state do this, and if so what legal standing does GA have to copyright the laws it passes?
TFS and TFA are clickbait. The law is not copyrighted. It's available for free right here.
The way it works in most states is multiple private companies hire their own lawyers and legal aides to annotate the state law. That is, to write brief commentary and summaries of other court cases that have been decided about that law. These are obviously very helpful reference materials for judges and state attorneys, too, so the state winds up buying annotated copies of their own laws from, say LexisNexis. The state of georgia got smart and said "this is stupid, we're spending all this taxpayer money on these annotations. Let's just commission LexisNexis directly to write the Official annotated version of GA state law, and our judges and officials will get it for free because we'll recoup the costs selling it to the private attorneys!"
This seems to work out very well for both GA taxpayers and the government. If you think this is immoral or illegal or something, okay, fine, they can go do it like every other state in which the state is paying the private companies. The costs to taxpayers will rise, and the taxpayers will get exactly the same number of free copies of the annotated laws they get today, and get in every other state: zero.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I would like for somebody to explain to me exactly how a publicly funded government entity can copyright, register, trademark, etc. anything that is paid for, like I said, with public money. If you live in Georgia, you paid for all of those laws being constructed with your hard-earned tax money, they are [partially] your property, and you are entitled to do with them what you will; barring, of course, changing them or claiming the work is your own. If I am a legal resident of Georgia then I should have every right to, say, print as many University of Georgia Bulldogs t-shirts I want to and sell them. How can they legally stop me?
that you're reaching for your gun the military won't be on your side anymore. They'll be looking at how you live and afraid they're gonna be there. That's what's happened with every military in human history. Every now and then a Generalissimo will rile them into action, but again, all you'll be doing is changing masters. You'll still be a slave.
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*Well, not technically allergies, but leopards can cause me to have impaired health.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes