Maybe you're the one with the confirmation bias? Just maybe? Could be? Kinda? Food for thought? Naw, naw you're just gonna keep spouting the same crap because it suits your goal, not because it's true.
Yes, the text of the law is available for free. What's not available for free is the annotations to the law, which is commentary, summaries of cases decided about the law, etc. The logic of the guy in TFA is is "Romeo & Juliet is public domain, therefore the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Romeo & Juliet should be public domain."
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.
Yes, but by "official code" they mean "the official set of annotations we commissioned instead of buying them from a 3rd party." 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!" They even require LexisNexis to make the (unannotated) code available for free to the public.
If you think that this is somehow immoral or evil, okay, the result will not be that the state of Georgia pays for the annotations and makes them available for free to everyone. Largely because no one actually cares about the annotations besides lawyers, so that would be a huge expense to the taxpayer with no real pay-off for them. The result will be GA going right back to the system everyone else uses of buying the annotated code from private 3rd parties, who still aren't going to compile all those summaries and give them away for free. Nothing is going to change because it seems to work out pretty well and saves money for the people and government of georgia, but raging nerds on the internet will continue to rage about the system, maaaaaan.
And, since it is the annotated state code that is the official law
No, the annotations are just summaries of other decisions. This is definitely a creative work. Yes, Romeo & Juliet is public domain, but if you write an essay summarizing Romeo & Juliet and its themes, that's your creative work.
I saw this story a year or so back, and if I recall the issue of the "official" copy of the law with annotations was Georgia's way of cutting out the middle man. In most states, various companies like Lexis-Nexis take the state laws and compile their guides to them, providing commentary, summaries, links to decisions, etc. This is obviously expensive and time consuming work. They then sell these to the lawyers in the state. This includes the DAs and the judges, who are obviously busy people. If you're making a decision about a certain law, it's very useful to have someone else already compiled a list of references to other cases that were decided about that law.
The state of Georgia said "this is stupid...let's just commission Lexis-Nexis to write the annotations ourselves, all our officials get the stuff for free now and we recoup the costs selling the annotations to the private attorneys just like before." This seems like a very good idea, and nobody in Georgia seems to have a problem with it. The guy in TFA got buttblasted though and tried to make it out like it's some kind of evil usurpation of your rights thing, and has thankfully been sued and lost.
If he got his way, you wouldn't be getting the annotations for free for the public. You would go right back to the old system where the annotations are written by private companies and then taxpayer money is spent on them as reference for judges and state attorneys.
They don't have legal force -- they just tell you how to interpret the law as written.
Not exactly. It's mostly summary of other court decisions that referenced the law in question. Decisions about a law are not the law itself, and a paragraph description of a decision is the product of the lawyer/legal aide who wrote the description, not the court, so they're copyrightable.
Where we have a problem is lazy judges. When writing their decisions, if they decide to look up other cases via the annotations they should follow the annotation to the actual decision, read it themselves to make sure they agree with the summary and the applicability of that precedent to the case in front of them, and cite that decision. Instead some lazy judges just cite the annotation. It's like writing an essay and citing Wikipedia, instead of following the citation on Wikipedia to Wikipedia's source and citing that.
As for the copyrightability of the annotations, Romeo and Juliet is public domain. Encyclopedia Britannica's article about Romeo and Juliet is copyright by Encyclopedia Britannica. If you demand Britannica be free because it's referencing something public domain, you're not going to get Britannica for free, you're going to get no Britannica at any price.
And that's where we have different value judgments. I think the illegal alien is a bigger issue. The cop is an aberration. There is no policy of shooting unarmed black people, nobody likes it, there's training against it. There's basically nothing to do about it because humans are imperfect and will make flawed snap decisions (assuming the decision was flawed...he could also be justified). But the illegal alien is a systemic problem of the government refusing to enforce the law. That could actually be fixed. The system could choose to enforce the law, and it's not.
But we have different value systems, so we see these things differently.
No, it's making up scare stories to tell Group A that Group B hates them and wants them to suffer, now Group A give us power to protect you from Group B. That's exactly what you are doing when you turn a story about the FCC telling ISPs to work through their state governments to manage a subsidy program that it's really about the evil racial hatred Republicans have for blacks. No, it's not. Love you, Bruce, big fan, you're great at the computers but you're an awful mind reader.
Except there WERE WMDs in Iraq. The CIA bought some, and some of our veterans had to be treated for coming into contact with them.
Yeah, that wasn't what made people go along with the war. I distinctly remember Colin Powell in front of the U.N. showing pictures of the aluminum tubes he said were for uranium enrichment. No, those tubes were not the right kind for uranium enrichment, the government's own experts told them that, and Powell said it anyway. It wasn't "wrong." It wasn't a "mistake." It was a deliberate lie.
It wasn't the threat of chemical weapons (that everyone knew Saddam had) that made them go along with the war. It was nukes, and there were no fucking nukes.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
In the past, people were only exposed to a handful of information sources, but now there are millions, all accessible at the click of a button.
No, in the past we had independent newspapers and radio/TV stations across the country. Then in the 90s we got media consolidation so that 5-6 major conglomerates own 90% of the media in the US. These conglomerates all have similar interests (hint: they're not the same as yours). Now all of a sudden we can do instant narrative checking and that's a big problem.
I think the underlying issue is that what's "real news" is determined entirely by your value system. Say an illegal Mexican rapes an American teenager on the same day a white cop guns down an unarmed black man. CNN spends all day on the shooting and doesn't mention the rape, Breitbart is splashing the rape story with WAR IN EUROPE sized font and doesn't talk about the shooting. Which one is failing to report the "real news?"
You're playing the "my side is enlightened intellectuals and the other side is twits" game, when it's twits all the way down. You don't get to claim that when Democrats would be nowhere without the black vote, and I guarantee they're not voting D because they reviewed all the scholarly research and determined that Democrats have the best plan to combat the challenges of climate change.
So then you agree with the author that we're losing the information war because somewhere, someone on the internet is wrong about the Boston bombers and the lizardmen?
Ugh. This is the failure of binary thinking. It is not even close to the "same thing."
You're right, it's not the same thing. It's far, far worse. Nobody believes the Navy SEALs set off the Boston bombs, and that hasn't had, at all, any effect on public policy. But the government lying, and the mainstream media beating the war drums for them has killed millions and destabilized entire nations.
If you look at a large group you can always find a few whackos who believe some crazy shit. From that poll, 5% of Obama voters believe Obama was the antichrist. 4% think lizardmen are running everything (with another 7% "not sure" about those wily lizardmen). So who the hell cares what some small fringe is doing? What matters is the large group of people that believed in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, because that's what got the world order fucked up, not a fringe belief in lizardmen.
So to look at the existence of fringe conspiracy theories and say "we're losing the information war!" Um...shouldn't the "information war" be about the stuff that starts the real wars?
Bias is inherent to humanity. Even just choosing what news is newsworthy is biased. So Breitbart goes nuts every time an illegal Mexican commits a crime and you say "well that's just right wing propaganda." But CNN goes nuts every time a cop shoots a black guy and you say "well that's important news!"
It's all propaganda. Breitbart is propaganda. CNN is propaganda. However, I think readers of Breitbart mostly understand they're reading right-wing propaganda. They're not trying to hide it. But people are watching CNN and thinking "these people are dedicated professionals just telling me The Truth (TM)." No they're not. They're selling you a narrative, too.
So this researcher is standing in the middle of lecture hall with the people on stage screaming lies through bullhorns and saying "hey, those 5 people over in the corner are whispering lies!" Yeah, sure, they are, they totally are. But what about the people on the stage? Isn't that kind of a problem, too? Maybe even a little bigger than the nutjobs in the corner?
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody's doing the raping.
And cops are more likely to shoot whites than blacks.
Maybe you're the one with the confirmation bias? Just maybe? Could be? Kinda? Food for thought? Naw, naw you're just gonna keep spouting the same crap because it suits your goal, not because it's true.
It is not produced by public servants, it is produced by LexisNexis.
It also allows them to reject a lot of climate science, because we can't build a second Earth to reproduce results on.
Yes. Climate "science" is rejected because it's not science.
Well if you can't publish the data you don't get to make laws and regulations based on that data.
"New law, /. users must be sterilized and/or executed."
"Why?!"
"They're bad! We know because science!"
"Well can I see the science?"
"No!"
"Oh okay then that make sense."
Yes, the text of the law is available for free. What's not available for free is the annotations to the law, which is commentary, summaries of cases decided about the law, etc. The logic of the guy in TFA is is "Romeo & Juliet is public domain, therefore the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Romeo & Juliet should be public domain."
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.
Yes, but by "official code" they mean "the official set of annotations we commissioned instead of buying them from a 3rd party." 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!" They even require LexisNexis to make the (unannotated) code available for free to the public.
If you think that this is somehow immoral or evil, okay, the result will not be that the state of Georgia pays for the annotations and makes them available for free to everyone. Largely because no one actually cares about the annotations besides lawyers, so that would be a huge expense to the taxpayer with no real pay-off for them. The result will be GA going right back to the system everyone else uses of buying the annotated code from private 3rd parties, who still aren't going to compile all those summaries and give them away for free. Nothing is going to change because it seems to work out pretty well and saves money for the people and government of georgia, but raging nerds on the internet will continue to rage about the system, maaaaaan.
And, since it is the annotated state code that is the official law
No, the annotations are just summaries of other decisions. This is definitely a creative work. Yes, Romeo & Juliet is public domain, but if you write an essay summarizing Romeo & Juliet and its themes, that's your creative work.
I saw this story a year or so back, and if I recall the issue of the "official" copy of the law with annotations was Georgia's way of cutting out the middle man. In most states, various companies like Lexis-Nexis take the state laws and compile their guides to them, providing commentary, summaries, links to decisions, etc. This is obviously expensive and time consuming work. They then sell these to the lawyers in the state. This includes the DAs and the judges, who are obviously busy people. If you're making a decision about a certain law, it's very useful to have someone else already compiled a list of references to other cases that were decided about that law.
The state of Georgia said "this is stupid...let's just commission Lexis-Nexis to write the annotations ourselves, all our officials get the stuff for free now and we recoup the costs selling the annotations to the private attorneys just like before." This seems like a very good idea, and nobody in Georgia seems to have a problem with it. The guy in TFA got buttblasted though and tried to make it out like it's some kind of evil usurpation of your rights thing, and has thankfully been sued and lost.
If he got his way, you wouldn't be getting the annotations for free for the public. You would go right back to the old system where the annotations are written by private companies and then taxpayer money is spent on them as reference for judges and state attorneys.
They don't have legal force -- they just tell you how to interpret the law as written.
Not exactly. It's mostly summary of other court decisions that referenced the law in question. Decisions about a law are not the law itself, and a paragraph description of a decision is the product of the lawyer/legal aide who wrote the description, not the court, so they're copyrightable.
Where we have a problem is lazy judges. When writing their decisions, if they decide to look up other cases via the annotations they should follow the annotation to the actual decision, read it themselves to make sure they agree with the summary and the applicability of that precedent to the case in front of them, and cite that decision. Instead some lazy judges just cite the annotation. It's like writing an essay and citing Wikipedia, instead of following the citation on Wikipedia to Wikipedia's source and citing that.
As for the copyrightability of the annotations, Romeo and Juliet is public domain. Encyclopedia Britannica's article about Romeo and Juliet is copyright by Encyclopedia Britannica. If you demand Britannica be free because it's referencing something public domain, you're not going to get Britannica for free, you're going to get no Britannica at any price.
but many of its readers have now grown up and moved out of their parents basement
It's adorable you think that.
And that's where we have different value judgments. I think the illegal alien is a bigger issue. The cop is an aberration. There is no policy of shooting unarmed black people, nobody likes it, there's training against it. There's basically nothing to do about it because humans are imperfect and will make flawed snap decisions (assuming the decision was flawed...he could also be justified). But the illegal alien is a systemic problem of the government refusing to enforce the law. That could actually be fixed. The system could choose to enforce the law, and it's not.
But we have different value systems, so we see these things differently.
Did they do that though? Or did they just move that regulating power back to the FTC where it belongs?
What's missing from the archived pages are the daily flame wars about the lack of lesbian eskimo transmidgets or whatever in STEM.
No, it's making up scare stories to tell Group A that Group B hates them and wants them to suffer, now Group A give us power to protect you from Group B. That's exactly what you are doing when you turn a story about the FCC telling ISPs to work through their state governments to manage a subsidy program that it's really about the evil racial hatred Republicans have for blacks. No, it's not. Love you, Bruce, big fan, you're great at the computers but you're an awful mind reader.
Except there WERE WMDs in Iraq. The CIA bought some, and some of our veterans had to be treated for coming into contact with them.
Yeah, that wasn't what made people go along with the war. I distinctly remember Colin Powell in front of the U.N. showing pictures of the aluminum tubes he said were for uranium enrichment. No, those tubes were not the right kind for uranium enrichment, the government's own experts told them that, and Powell said it anyway. It wasn't "wrong." It wasn't a "mistake." It was a deliberate lie.
It wasn't the threat of chemical weapons (that everyone knew Saddam had) that made them go along with the war. It was nukes, and there were no fucking nukes.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/po...
This 'guy' is named Kate.
Are you assuming xir's gender, shitlord?!?!
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
In the past, people were only exposed to a handful of information sources, but now there are millions, all accessible at the click of a button.
No, in the past we had independent newspapers and radio/TV stations across the country. Then in the 90s we got media consolidation so that 5-6 major conglomerates own 90% of the media in the US. These conglomerates all have similar interests (hint: they're not the same as yours). Now all of a sudden we can do instant narrative checking and that's a big problem.
Gulf of Tonkin. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. NSA collecting all your shit.
The flipside is failure to report real news.
I think the underlying issue is that what's "real news" is determined entirely by your value system. Say an illegal Mexican rapes an American teenager on the same day a white cop guns down an unarmed black man. CNN spends all day on the shooting and doesn't mention the rape, Breitbart is splashing the rape story with WAR IN EUROPE sized font and doesn't talk about the shooting. Which one is failing to report the "real news?"
You're playing the "my side is enlightened intellectuals and the other side is twits" game, when it's twits all the way down. You don't get to claim that when Democrats would be nowhere without the black vote, and I guarantee they're not voting D because they reviewed all the scholarly research and determined that Democrats have the best plan to combat the challenges of climate change.
So then you agree with the author that we're losing the information war because somewhere, someone on the internet is wrong about the Boston bombers and the lizardmen?
Ugh. This is the failure of binary thinking. It is not even close to the "same thing."
You're right, it's not the same thing. It's far, far worse. Nobody believes the Navy SEALs set off the Boston bombs, and that hasn't had, at all, any effect on public policy. But the government lying, and the mainstream media beating the war drums for them has killed millions and destabilized entire nations.
If you look at a large group you can always find a few whackos who believe some crazy shit. From that poll, 5% of Obama voters believe Obama was the antichrist. 4% think lizardmen are running everything (with another 7% "not sure" about those wily lizardmen). So who the hell cares what some small fringe is doing? What matters is the large group of people that believed in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, because that's what got the world order fucked up, not a fringe belief in lizardmen.
So to look at the existence of fringe conspiracy theories and say "we're losing the information war!" Um...shouldn't the "information war" be about the stuff that starts the real wars?
Journalists are professionals who are dedicated to finding and making public the truth.
No, sometimes CNN is just straight-up lying. You are an example of the problem I'm talking about.
Bias is inherent to humanity. Even just choosing what news is newsworthy is biased. So Breitbart goes nuts every time an illegal Mexican commits a crime and you say "well that's just right wing propaganda." But CNN goes nuts every time a cop shoots a black guy and you say "well that's important news!"
It's all propaganda. Breitbart is propaganda. CNN is propaganda. However, I think readers of Breitbart mostly understand they're reading right-wing propaganda. They're not trying to hide it. But people are watching CNN and thinking "these people are dedicated professionals just telling me The Truth (TM)." No they're not. They're selling you a narrative, too.
So this researcher is standing in the middle of lecture hall with the people on stage screaming lies through bullhorns and saying "hey, those 5 people over in the corner are whispering lies!" Yeah, sure, they are, they totally are. But what about the people on the stage? Isn't that kind of a problem, too? Maybe even a little bigger than the nutjobs in the corner?