6 ms·

If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

167 points by chha 10y ago

vqc 10y ago
This is a problem for many of the municipalities in the United States. I'm not familiar with the history of how this ended up happening for Georgia, but for municipalities the cause is often the economics of codifying and publishing the official code. Assembling the laws into a usable code is extremely labor intensive. Someone has to figure out where the new law fits into the old code and copy and paste as necessary. Governments often outsource the work to a third party vendor in order to free up internal human and monetary resources. The end effect is that the codifier controls the code. There are all kinds of downstream effects. For one, computer-readable formats of the law are nonexistent. This also means that there is a huge barrier to creating interesting new technologies on top of the law. I'm the cofounder at Open Law Library (http://www.openlawlib.org http://www.openlawlib.org), a non-profit that is trying to fix this problem by introducing technology at all stages of the law making process. We're working with Washington D.C. right now, and you can find a glimpse into the future at https://beta.code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/code/ https://beta.code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/code/ (bulk downloads available at the link at the bottom).
- cowardlydragon 10y ago
  Oh, I'm sorry, is the poor burden of publishing the laws of a government too hard for the big bad government to possibly do or fund? Of course the solution is to make it copyrighted / restricted / owned by a third party corporation. What? Simplify laws or properly fund the ancillary tasks entailed in changing laws? Blasphemy. This is corruption, nothing else.
chha 10y ago
One would think that making laws and regulations easily accessible would be a priority for lawmakers. Is this issue exclusive to Georgia, or are there other states or nations with similar restrictions?
- AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
  > One would think that making laws and regulations easily accessible would be a priority for lawmakers. Not really. It continues the trend towards making poverty a crime.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    How is that a trend, and not just the reality this country was founded on? How many of the original people here were either indentured, or just enslaved? We just keep shuffling the verbiage and the optics every few decades while refining the overall system. Slavery in prisons, rotating jail terms for people who can't pay fines for arbitrary crap, no education, no hope, and no voice.
    - talmand 10y ago
      I wouldn't say the country was "founded" on such things. Yes, they were interwoven into the fabric of the country at the time; but the country was also created in a way that opened the door to remove those things. As for your last sentence; that's the inevitable outcome of almost all civilizations which is why revolutions happen at a somewhat steady rate.
      - M_Grey 10y ago
        It was literally founded on those things, in the sense that the original inhabitants were about 50% indentured and they built the damned place. Saying that the US wasn't founded on these realities is like saying the AU wasn't founded as a prison colony.
        narrowrail 10y ago
        As someone who is part Cherokee (on the Dawes' Rolls), what do you mean by 'original inhabitants'?
        10y ago
LambdaComplex 10y ago
As the saying goes, "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Seems like you could argue that's incredibly unfair (classist, maybe?) in this case. Then again, you could probably make a good argument that it's unfair even if all the laws are freely available.
flyaway 10y ago
> [the judge] made the extraordinary finding that Public.Resource.Org is engaged in "commercial" copying despite being a nonprofit, stating that the organization "profits" by "the attention, recognition, and contributions it receives in association with its copying and distributing the copyrighted OCGA annotations, and its use was neither nonprofit nor educational." I know legal definitions might not always mesh with lay definitions, but is this a standard interpretation of "commercial?" It makes sense if you factor in that the grants public.resource.org receives (a few 100k a year) are directly related to their presentation of information, but the quoted passage seems a bit all-encompassing.
- Roodgorf 10y ago
  I would also be interested to see how this is being interpreted as not "educational".
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  This struck me as the most outrageous aspect of the story. I think having a 3rd party host laws behind a paywall is a terrible idea in terms of the public good, but I can at least see that the cost based argument behind it is coherent. But the judge finding Malmud to be engaged in "commercial" activity and "profiting" without profiting is some Orwellian bs and seems to me to be belie a personal stake in this decision. After all, judges in Georgia have no incentive to see defense lawyers get better/freer access to the annotated case law (and the state prosecutors surely get it for free anyway). I hope Malmud succeeds in appealing.
  - Erik816 10y ago
    Can you spell out why judges don't have an incentive for defense lawyers to have better access to the law? When I was clerking for a judge, my main complaint was that the legal briefs were not well written or researched and I basically had to do it myself. Informed lawyers make it easier on the judge and his staff.
    - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
bighi 10y ago
And here I am, again and again being reminded how the US can be so backwards in some issues here and there. Not making THEIR OWN LAWS in its entirety available for free for every citizen? What the hell is this?
- lichform 10y ago
  As far as I can tell this is the result of an interaction between laws, and not the result of the law itself. It's not as if "laws being copyright-punishable" was an intended design decision when they were written up, so it seems disingenuous to phrase it as if this were the case.
- ivraatiems 10y ago
  It's important to note that Georgia is one state out of fifty; most states don't do this and many have the entire body of their laws available online from the official source, not a third-party provider (And federal law certainly is as well.) What is fair to say is that the patchwork nature of America's state/federal system divide makes these kinds of gross inconsistencies happen more often than they maybe should, and it'd be fair to criticize Georgia in particular for letting/encouraging this to happen. But it's not a fair critique of the whole country, and you shouldn't add it to your mental reference of "ways the US is effed up" except to the extent that "some states do bad stuff" is already on there. Also, the authorized publisher, LexisNexis, makes the entire code available online for free here.[1] [1]http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/Default.asp http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/Default.asp
  - YCode 10y ago
    Someone else mentioned the version made available to the public is not the annotated version, and apparently the annotations are considered as official parts of the law. This I think was the sticking point for the article.
  - cowardlydragon 10y ago
    And Georgia sucks. Not as bad as Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, or Arkansas. But definitely in the next tier. At least it is gradually entering North Carolina territory.
mabbo 10y ago
This is how democracy ends. You can go to jail for committing crimes you didn't know were against the law, but you can't know what the laws are unless you pay nearly a month's wages at minimum wage.
- bighi 10y ago
  > This is how democracy ends If we're talking about actual democracy, we might even say it never started.
- gremlinsinc 10y ago
  If America were a democracy, there's a big difference between Republic and Democracy
  - throwaway2048 10y ago
    I see these comments without fail whenever anybody mentions the term democracy. Everybody knows what is meant by the term, your pedantry is neither insightful, nor interesting, its just distracting, pointless noise. Please stop.
    - aanm1988 10y ago
      It's also incorrect. A democracy and a republic are not mutually exclusive.
  - unclenoriega 10y ago
    > I understand your meaning, and I know everyone else understands your meaning. Still, I need to clutter the discussion with misguided pedantry. This is what I see when I read your comment. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy
- jackhack 10y ago
  Secret laws, Secret courts, hush orders... Hardly the USA described by the Constitution I read.
gersh 10y ago
Can a defense attorney in Georgia argue their client couldn't obey the law because they couldn't afford to know the law?
- 77pt77 10y ago
  They can argue all they want, but the client will still lose if that is the only point the defence has.
  - soundwave106 10y ago
    Georgia does have a public records law (http://legal.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/images/186385699r1.pdf http://legal.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/images/186385699...). It would be interesting to see how the concept of annotations hidden behind a LexisNexis paywall meshes with open records laws here and elsewhere. At casual glance, the notions don't seem to jive very well if (as seems to be implied in articles) the annotations are not just private analysis, but are used as the basis of public law itself. (Note, in Googling, I see this issue has been brought up in at least one legal blog -- https://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2011/07/15/tear-down-this-paywall/ https://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2011/07/15/tear-down-thi... -- and apparently is a problem in not just Georgia.)
    - dzdt 10y ago
      The defendant here got their initial copy of the law by such an open records request! See the mention of $1207.02 in the first paragraph, that amount being the copying fee. The state here is insisting he cannot distribute further copies. Anyone else can request a copy from the state via open records law, and again pay the "nominal" copying fee (or pay a smaller fee to Lexus-Nexus for access). What you cannot do is get a copy for free, or make a copy for anyone else if you paid for one!
- briandear 10y ago
  It's available for free.
csneeky 10y ago
Not debating that Georgia should make it easier for folks to do what they want with the copy they publish for free but... What's fair is that LexisNexis be compensated for the value it has added to that Law (e.g., the "annotations"/links). They did the work. It is up to them how to share it. And sharing for free isn't always a viable business. Note that there is nothing to stop Public.Resource.Org or anyone else from adding their own metadata on top of that Law and publishing it. But if it was done by LexisNexis and licenced by the state of Georgia of course they will come after someone that tries to publish the Law + The Annotations. And they would be right to in a capitalist society (which is where we all live and how we thrive). If Georgia can still come after someone else for annotating the Law themselves (original work, not a copy of the work LexisNexis did) and sharing it how they want then I would agree there is some kind of problem there. But NOT the problem implied by the article headline (which is a little clickbaity IMHO).
- ar0 10y ago
  I agree that the problem as far as I understand it is not really that related to copyright: the law (unannotated) is freely available, as it should be, and of course value-adding annotations by private enterprise can hold enforcable copyright. (The references in other comments below to EU regulations etc. are thus not really applicable, as also in the EU you have freely available laws but privately copyrighted annotations and comments to these laws.) What I gather from the article, though, and which I do find in a way even stranger than the copyright question, is this: Apparently Georgia has made the annotated version of their law "official"! Can this be right? For me, this sounds far worse than the copyright question - it would mean that you give an official stamp of approval to privately prepared annotations? The article is not that clear on this question. Wikipedia [1] has some more on it, but not being a lawyer, I also can't answer the question I would have about it, which is this: What's the role of these privately prepared annotations for the judiciary process? Are they treated like law, because they are published together with the law? Or are they treated like any other private comment / annotations out there would? This, for me, seems to be the crucial question. If it is the former, they should be freely available (and, more importantly, not be written by a private company!). If it is the latter, then I think LexisNexis has some point claiming their copyright, no? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Code_of_Georgia_Annotated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Code_of_Georgia_Annot...
jcizzle 10y ago
Here's the full, freely available state of Georgia code: http://www.legis.ga.gov/en-US/default.aspx http://www.legis.ga.gov/en-US/default.aspx. It seems like some folks may not like that a private company does the hosting or that they have exclusive rights to its reproduction. You could consider some reasons this might be the case that are reasonable, like the cost of maintaining it is actually cheaper by having a company who has the appropriate resources and infrastructure to support it, it's probably a challenge/costly to hire an internal team to maintain it at a high enough quality level, the hosting company made a deal with the government to reduce maintenance and hosting costs by having exclusive hosting/reproduction rights. These are all pretty reasonable things to happen,given that the source text is still freely available to anyone. I think anyone who has an argument against this is probably looking for a reason to get upset at what they perceive to be unfairness by "the other team", and won't be convinced otherwise. Such is life, oh well.
- ivraatiems 10y ago
  I think it is completely reasonable to take the position that the law should be freely accessible to all, and also the process of providing it should not be in the hands of a private entity, or if it must be, that said entity cannot do things like be the exclusive provider, or charge egregiously for things like copies in a reasonable medium (e. g. paper or CD). It's not a "team" thing, and I reject wholly the implication that anyone opposed to this is just trying to score political points for their "team." Perhaps people twisting the narrative to "they won't let anyone read the laws!" are indeed politically motivated, but that's not what you or I are discussing here -- and even so, you need to assume good faith if you want a discussion. While it is reasonable for LexisNexis to be the official provider, it is not reasonable for them to abuse this privilege by charging silly amounts for certain kinds of access, and it is not reasonable for the state to sue to prevent others from distributing copies of what should by all rights be public domain and fully accessible material. Those problems are what's at issue here, not whether or not the state can hire a DB administrator.
  - jcizzle 10y ago
    But it is freely available, I included the link.
Mendenhall 10y ago
It appears it is not about publishing the "law" but publishing the annotations written about the law that was the issue.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  But complicated by the fact that those annotations are considered official parts of the law. If it were standard legal commentary, there'd be no issue. But the state has made those part of the law and (effectively) barred viewing them without paying a steep (for the average person) price. So the only free portion to view is a subset of the current legal code.
mikekchar 10y ago
How does case law work in the US? Must these annotations be used in interpreting the law, or is it merely an indication of how the law has been interpreted previously? To me, this is the crucial point. If the judge is forced to use the annotations in interpreting the law, then it seems clear that it is part of the law. If it is not, then I can completely understand how it is covered by copyright. I suppose the other question is if they intend (or are able) to appeal. It sounds like something that could potentially make it up to the supreme court if it is not already clear.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  IANAL but it's my understanding that, for low court cases, it's not that a judge is forced to abide by the case law precedents so much as that they're overwhelmingly likely to, so in practice the annotations are probably essential reading for anticipating how a case will play out. And the unannotated law are probably akin to a formal tech spec - not very useful to anyone except the primary implementor, and especially not to laypeople trying to learn the law or self defend. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent#United_States_legal_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent#United_States_legal_...
NoGravitas 10y ago
Look, a correct use of HTTP status code 451: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/ga/georgia.scan.2013/gov.law.ga.code.01.2013.pdf https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/ga/georgia.scan.2013/go...
- JimmyM 10y ago
  I see 403 in Chrome DevTools, though.
  - Freak_NL 10y ago
    For compatibility reasons perhaps? I would expect evergreen browsers such as Firefox and Chrome to handle a proper HTTP 451 without issues though.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
      Any browser should. Any 4xx HTTP status code is an error.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - NoGravitas 10y ago
    Oh, that's disappointing.
joshuaheard 10y ago
The text of the Georgia law is not copyrightable, and the article states this. The issue is with the annotations, which are basically links to related resources. These are made at great effort and expense by Lexis/Nexis, a private company. These annotations are copyrightable. The mistake is Georgia making the annotated version of its codes the "official" version.
- plussed_reader 10y ago
  "Mistake."
- wnissen 10y ago
  Except every bill in the legislature is called "An Act to amend the Official Code of Georgia Annotated." It's not a mistake, the official version is the annotated version. There's no daylight between the mythical "unannotated" version and the annotated one.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    Very likely, the annotations have no controlling legal effect. The difference between unofficial and official versions of the text largely relies on which version will control the interpretation if there is a copying error (e.g., one says "remuneration" and one says "enumeration"). I suspect Georgia made the annotated code official on the basis that it's the copy that everyone already has. Stripping out the annotations and publishing that should be completely kosher for copyright and would still give the controlling version of the law (assuming no copying errors were made, of course).
    - khedoros1 10y ago
      A law gets passed. Years later, a court case comes up about it that changes the way that the law is usually interpreted. There's nothing in the law itself that links those two occurrences, but the legal case has essentially clarified and/or rewritten the original law. The annotations would link those. Sure, you could read through both parts of the law (the codes and the court cases), and presumably that's what Lexisnexis did, but it doesn't seem like the unannotated state law would be practically useful, because it won't transparently reflect what the actual controlling version of the law is.
Roboprog 10y ago
Yeah, some days I think the US civil war was a mistake, and the south should have just become a separate country. Sort of a "Mexico North", or something. With apologies to otherwise intelligent people that have to live in that hell hole...
- hospes 10y ago
  There is no hell hole in south, please do not dramatize things. Travel to south then go to east and west, you will see that if you are in big cities they are not that different from each other. Rural areas on the other hand are different from the cities. There is a widespread lack of education across the country mostly in rural areas and in poor urban areas. But it is not only south issue that is an issue all over the country. Combine that with wealth inequality and we get what we have. You can see the same trends in elections, big cities mostly go blue or even dark blue, even in traditionally conservative states.
- licyeus 10y ago
  The problem isn't exclusive to Georgia (or the South). The State of Oregon also filed suit (later dismissed, IIRC) against Malamud for republishing their laws. And most progressive cities publish their official code through 3rd parties with restrictive copyright attached. This problem exists for all of America.
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    Oh. Well that's just great, then :-)
cmurf 10y ago
Long live the Confederacy! That's all this is, aristocrats who believe in pay to play. There is no right to be part of civilized society, you must be useful, in which case you can pay to play. If you're not useful you can wither and die. They lost the war, so now it's this neo-feudal free market applied to everything. The democratic free marketers should be bothered by this because they're going to take your system to its natural conclusion: the gangs of New York. Voting is also becoming pay to play. You must pay $$ for a government issued photo ID that proves you're a citizen if you want to vote. And this can effectively be any amount of money, established by the necessary cost of production, using patented, proprietary technology owned by a corporation. It's corporatocracy, kakistocracy, plutocracy, aristocracy - all in one.
hrehhf 10y ago
Has there been any attempts by anyone to publish these laws via Bittorrent or ipfs? Not that I am condoning it, but I'm curious if it has been attempted. I searched but did not find anything.
hilbert42 10y ago
This is damn disgraceful (and that's about as respectable a comment I can make about it). The same atrocious behavior happens in Britain and commonwealth countries with Crown Copyright. For the life of me, why do we put up with this nonsense? We ought to be rioting in the streets over it until fixed. (It's little wonder our democracies are in such big trouble when so few of the citizenry actually care about atrocities committed against democracy by 'The State'.)

167 points by chha 10y ago

vqc 10y ago

This is a problem for many of the municipalities in the United States. I'm not familiar with the history of how this ended up happening for Georgia, but for municipalities the cause is often the economics of codifying and publishing the official code. Assembling the laws into a usable code is extremely labor intensive. Someone has to figure out where the new law fits into the old code and copy and paste as necessary. Governments often outsource the work to a third party vendor in order to free up internal human and monetary resources. The end effect is that the codifier controls the code. There are all kinds of downstream effects. For one, computer-readable formats of the law are nonexistent. This also means that there is a huge barrier to creating interesting new technologies on top of the law. I'm the cofounder at Open Law Library (http://www.openlawlib.org http://www.openlawlib.org), a non-profit that is trying to fix this problem by introducing technology at all stages of the law making process. We're working with Washington D.C. right now, and you can find a glimpse into the future at https://beta.code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/code/ https://beta.code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/code/ (bulk downloads available at the link at the bottom).

cowardlydragon 10y ago
Oh, I'm sorry, is the poor burden of publishing the laws of a government too hard for the big bad government to possibly do or fund? Of course the solution is to make it copyrighted / restricted / owned by a third party corporation. What? Simplify laws or properly fund the ancillary tasks entailed in changing laws? Blasphemy. This is corruption, nothing else.

chha 10y ago

One would think that making laws and regulations easily accessible would be a priority for lawmakers. Is this issue exclusive to Georgia, or are there other states or nations with similar restrictions?

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
> One would think that making laws and regulations easily accessible would be a priority for lawmakers. Not really. It continues the trend towards making poverty a crime.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  How is that a trend, and not just the reality this country was founded on? How many of the original people here were either indentured, or just enslaved? We just keep shuffling the verbiage and the optics every few decades while refining the overall system. Slavery in prisons, rotating jail terms for people who can't pay fines for arbitrary crap, no education, no hope, and no voice.
  - talmand 10y ago
    I wouldn't say the country was "founded" on such things. Yes, they were interwoven into the fabric of the country at the time; but the country was also created in a way that opened the door to remove those things. As for your last sentence; that's the inevitable outcome of almost all civilizations which is why revolutions happen at a somewhat steady rate.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      It was literally founded on those things, in the sense that the original inhabitants were about 50% indentured and they built the damned place. Saying that the US wasn't founded on these realities is like saying the AU wasn't founded as a prison colony.
      - narrowrail 10y ago
        As someone who is part Cherokee (on the Dawes' Rolls), what do you mean by 'original inhabitants'?
        10y ago

LambdaComplex 10y ago

As the saying goes, "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Seems like you could argue that's incredibly unfair (classist, maybe?) in this case. Then again, you could probably make a good argument that it's unfair even if all the laws are freely available.

flyaway 10y ago

> [the judge] made the extraordinary finding that Public.Resource.Org is engaged in "commercial" copying despite being a nonprofit, stating that the organization "profits" by "the attention, recognition, and contributions it receives in association with its copying and distributing the copyrighted OCGA annotations, and its use was neither nonprofit nor educational." I know legal definitions might not always mesh with lay definitions, but is this a standard interpretation of "commercial?" It makes sense if you factor in that the grants public.resource.org receives (a few 100k a year) are directly related to their presentation of information, but the quoted passage seems a bit all-encompassing.

Roodgorf 10y ago
I would also be interested to see how this is being interpreted as not "educational".
MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
This struck me as the most outrageous aspect of the story. I think having a 3rd party host laws behind a paywall is a terrible idea in terms of the public good, but I can at least see that the cost based argument behind it is coherent. But the judge finding Malmud to be engaged in "commercial" activity and "profiting" without profiting is some Orwellian bs and seems to me to be belie a personal stake in this decision. After all, judges in Georgia have no incentive to see defense lawyers get better/freer access to the annotated case law (and the state prosecutors surely get it for free anyway). I hope Malmud succeeds in appealing.
- Erik816 10y ago
  Can you spell out why judges don't have an incentive for defense lawyers to have better access to the law? When I was clerking for a judge, my main complaint was that the legal briefs were not well written or researched and I basically had to do it myself. Informed lawyers make it easier on the judge and his staff.
  - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago

bighi 10y ago

And here I am, again and again being reminded how the US can be so backwards in some issues here and there. Not making THEIR OWN LAWS in its entirety available for free for every citizen? What the hell is this?

lichform 10y ago
As far as I can tell this is the result of an interaction between laws, and not the result of the law itself. It's not as if "laws being copyright-punishable" was an intended design decision when they were written up, so it seems disingenuous to phrase it as if this were the case.
ivraatiems 10y ago
It's important to note that Georgia is one state out of fifty; most states don't do this and many have the entire body of their laws available online from the official source, not a third-party provider (And federal law certainly is as well.) What is fair to say is that the patchwork nature of America's state/federal system divide makes these kinds of gross inconsistencies happen more often than they maybe should, and it'd be fair to criticize Georgia in particular for letting/encouraging this to happen. But it's not a fair critique of the whole country, and you shouldn't add it to your mental reference of "ways the US is effed up" except to the extent that "some states do bad stuff" is already on there. Also, the authorized publisher, LexisNexis, makes the entire code available online for free here.[1] [1]http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/Default.asp http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/Default.asp
- YCode 10y ago
  Someone else mentioned the version made available to the public is not the annotated version, and apparently the annotations are considered as official parts of the law. This I think was the sticking point for the article.
- cowardlydragon 10y ago
  And Georgia sucks. Not as bad as Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, or Arkansas. But definitely in the next tier. At least it is gradually entering North Carolina territory.

mabbo 10y ago

This is how democracy ends. You can go to jail for committing crimes you didn't know were against the law, but you can't know what the laws are unless you pay nearly a month's wages at minimum wage.

bighi 10y ago
> This is how democracy ends If we're talking about actual democracy, we might even say it never started.
gremlinsinc 10y ago
If America were a democracy, there's a big difference between Republic and Democracy
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  I see these comments without fail whenever anybody mentions the term democracy. Everybody knows what is meant by the term, your pedantry is neither insightful, nor interesting, its just distracting, pointless noise. Please stop.
  - aanm1988 10y ago
    It's also incorrect. A democracy and a republic are not mutually exclusive.
- unclenoriega 10y ago
  > I understand your meaning, and I know everyone else understands your meaning. Still, I need to clutter the discussion with misguided pedantry. This is what I see when I read your comment. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy
jackhack 10y ago
Secret laws, Secret courts, hush orders... Hardly the USA described by the Constitution I read.

gersh 10y ago

Can a defense attorney in Georgia argue their client couldn't obey the law because they couldn't afford to know the law?

77pt77 10y ago
They can argue all they want, but the client will still lose if that is the only point the defence has.
- soundwave106 10y ago
  Georgia does have a public records law (http://legal.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/images/186385699r1.pdf http://legal.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/images/186385699...). It would be interesting to see how the concept of annotations hidden behind a LexisNexis paywall meshes with open records laws here and elsewhere. At casual glance, the notions don't seem to jive very well if (as seems to be implied in articles) the annotations are not just private analysis, but are used as the basis of public law itself. (Note, in Googling, I see this issue has been brought up in at least one legal blog -- https://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2011/07/15/tear-down-this-paywall/ https://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2011/07/15/tear-down-thi... -- and apparently is a problem in not just Georgia.)
  - dzdt 10y ago
    The defendant here got their initial copy of the law by such an open records request! See the mention of $1207.02 in the first paragraph, that amount being the copying fee. The state here is insisting he cannot distribute further copies. Anyone else can request a copy from the state via open records law, and again pay the "nominal" copying fee (or pay a smaller fee to Lexus-Nexus for access). What you cannot do is get a copy for free, or make a copy for anyone else if you paid for one!
briandear 10y ago
It's available for free.

csneeky 10y ago

Not debating that Georgia should make it easier for folks to do what they want with the copy they publish for free but... What's fair is that LexisNexis be compensated for the value it has added to that Law (e.g., the "annotations"/links). They did the work. It is up to them how to share it. And sharing for free isn't always a viable business. Note that there is nothing to stop Public.Resource.Org or anyone else from adding their own metadata on top of that Law and publishing it. But if it was done by LexisNexis and licenced by the state of Georgia of course they will come after someone that tries to publish the Law + The Annotations. And they would be right to in a capitalist society (which is where we all live and how we thrive). If Georgia can still come after someone else for annotating the Law themselves (original work, not a copy of the work LexisNexis did) and sharing it how they want then I would agree there is some kind of problem there. But NOT the problem implied by the article headline (which is a little clickbaity IMHO).

ar0 10y ago
I agree that the problem as far as I understand it is not really that related to copyright: the law (unannotated) is freely available, as it should be, and of course value-adding annotations by private enterprise can hold enforcable copyright. (The references in other comments below to EU regulations etc. are thus not really applicable, as also in the EU you have freely available laws but privately copyrighted annotations and comments to these laws.) What I gather from the article, though, and which I do find in a way even stranger than the copyright question, is this: Apparently Georgia has made the annotated version of their law "official"! Can this be right? For me, this sounds far worse than the copyright question - it would mean that you give an official stamp of approval to privately prepared annotations? The article is not that clear on this question. Wikipedia [1] has some more on it, but not being a lawyer, I also can't answer the question I would have about it, which is this: What's the role of these privately prepared annotations for the judiciary process? Are they treated like law, because they are published together with the law? Or are they treated like any other private comment / annotations out there would? This, for me, seems to be the crucial question. If it is the former, they should be freely available (and, more importantly, not be written by a private company!). If it is the latter, then I think LexisNexis has some point claiming their copyright, no? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Code_of_Georgia_Annotated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Code_of_Georgia_Annot...

jcizzle 10y ago

Here's the full, freely available state of Georgia code: http://www.legis.ga.gov/en-US/default.aspx http://www.legis.ga.gov/en-US/default.aspx. It seems like some folks may not like that a private company does the hosting or that they have exclusive rights to its reproduction. You could consider some reasons this might be the case that are reasonable, like the cost of maintaining it is actually cheaper by having a company who has the appropriate resources and infrastructure to support it, it's probably a challenge/costly to hire an internal team to maintain it at a high enough quality level, the hosting company made a deal with the government to reduce maintenance and hosting costs by having exclusive hosting/reproduction rights. These are all pretty reasonable things to happen,given that the source text is still freely available to anyone. I think anyone who has an argument against this is probably looking for a reason to get upset at what they perceive to be unfairness by "the other team", and won't be convinced otherwise. Such is life, oh well.

ivraatiems 10y ago
I think it is completely reasonable to take the position that the law should be freely accessible to all, and also the process of providing it should not be in the hands of a private entity, or if it must be, that said entity cannot do things like be the exclusive provider, or charge egregiously for things like copies in a reasonable medium (e. g. paper or CD). It's not a "team" thing, and I reject wholly the implication that anyone opposed to this is just trying to score political points for their "team." Perhaps people twisting the narrative to "they won't let anyone read the laws!" are indeed politically motivated, but that's not what you or I are discussing here -- and even so, you need to assume good faith if you want a discussion. While it is reasonable for LexisNexis to be the official provider, it is not reasonable for them to abuse this privilege by charging silly amounts for certain kinds of access, and it is not reasonable for the state to sue to prevent others from distributing copies of what should by all rights be public domain and fully accessible material. Those problems are what's at issue here, not whether or not the state can hire a DB administrator.
- jcizzle 10y ago
  But it is freely available, I included the link.

Mendenhall 10y ago

It appears it is not about publishing the "law" but publishing the annotations written about the law that was the issue.

Jtsummers 10y ago
But complicated by the fact that those annotations are considered official parts of the law. If it were standard legal commentary, there'd be no issue. But the state has made those part of the law and (effectively) barred viewing them without paying a steep (for the average person) price. So the only free portion to view is a subset of the current legal code.

mikekchar 10y ago

How does case law work in the US? Must these annotations be used in interpreting the law, or is it merely an indication of how the law has been interpreted previously? To me, this is the crucial point. If the judge is forced to use the annotations in interpreting the law, then it seems clear that it is part of the law. If it is not, then I can completely understand how it is covered by copyright. I suppose the other question is if they intend (or are able) to appeal. It sounds like something that could potentially make it up to the supreme court if it is not already clear.

MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
IANAL but it's my understanding that, for low court cases, it's not that a judge is forced to abide by the case law precedents so much as that they're overwhelmingly likely to, so in practice the annotations are probably essential reading for anticipating how a case will play out. And the unannotated law are probably akin to a formal tech spec - not very useful to anyone except the primary implementor, and especially not to laypeople trying to learn the law or self defend. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent#United_States_legal_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent#United_States_legal_...

NoGravitas 10y ago

Look, a correct use of HTTP status code 451: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/ga/georgia.scan.2013/gov.law.ga.code.01.2013.pdf https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/ga/georgia.scan.2013/go...

JimmyM 10y ago
I see 403 in Chrome DevTools, though.
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  For compatibility reasons perhaps? I would expect evergreen browsers such as Firefox and Chrome to handle a proper HTTP 451 without issues though.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    Any browser should. Any 4xx HTTP status code is an error.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  Oh, that's disappointing.

joshuaheard 10y ago

The text of the Georgia law is not copyrightable, and the article states this. The issue is with the annotations, which are basically links to related resources. These are made at great effort and expense by Lexis/Nexis, a private company. These annotations are copyrightable. The mistake is Georgia making the annotated version of its codes the "official" version.

plussed_reader 10y ago
"Mistake."
wnissen 10y ago
Except every bill in the legislature is called "An Act to amend the Official Code of Georgia Annotated." It's not a mistake, the official version is the annotated version. There's no daylight between the mythical "unannotated" version and the annotated one.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  Very likely, the annotations have no controlling legal effect. The difference between unofficial and official versions of the text largely relies on which version will control the interpretation if there is a copying error (e.g., one says "remuneration" and one says "enumeration"). I suspect Georgia made the annotated code official on the basis that it's the copy that everyone already has. Stripping out the annotations and publishing that should be completely kosher for copyright and would still give the controlling version of the law (assuming no copying errors were made, of course).
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    A law gets passed. Years later, a court case comes up about it that changes the way that the law is usually interpreted. There's nothing in the law itself that links those two occurrences, but the legal case has essentially clarified and/or rewritten the original law. The annotations would link those. Sure, you could read through both parts of the law (the codes and the court cases), and presumably that's what Lexisnexis did, but it doesn't seem like the unannotated state law would be practically useful, because it won't transparently reflect what the actual controlling version of the law is.

Roboprog 10y ago

Yeah, some days I think the US civil war was a mistake, and the south should have just become a separate country. Sort of a "Mexico North", or something. With apologies to otherwise intelligent people that have to live in that hell hole...

hospes 10y ago
There is no hell hole in south, please do not dramatize things. Travel to south then go to east and west, you will see that if you are in big cities they are not that different from each other. Rural areas on the other hand are different from the cities. There is a widespread lack of education across the country mostly in rural areas and in poor urban areas. But it is not only south issue that is an issue all over the country. Combine that with wealth inequality and we get what we have. You can see the same trends in elections, big cities mostly go blue or even dark blue, even in traditionally conservative states.
licyeus 10y ago
The problem isn't exclusive to Georgia (or the South). The State of Oregon also filed suit (later dismissed, IIRC) against Malamud for republishing their laws. And most progressive cities publish their official code through 3rd parties with restrictive copyright attached. This problem exists for all of America.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  Oh. Well that's just great, then :-)

cmurf 10y ago

Long live the Confederacy! That's all this is, aristocrats who believe in pay to play. There is no right to be part of civilized society, you must be useful, in which case you can pay to play. If you're not useful you can wither and die. They lost the war, so now it's this neo-feudal free market applied to everything. The democratic free marketers should be bothered by this because they're going to take your system to its natural conclusion: the gangs of New York. Voting is also becoming pay to play. You must pay $$ for a government issued photo ID that proves you're a citizen if you want to vote. And this can effectively be any amount of money, established by the necessary cost of production, using patented, proprietary technology owned by a corporation. It's corporatocracy, kakistocracy, plutocracy, aristocracy - all in one.

hrehhf 10y ago

Has there been any attempts by anyone to publish these laws via Bittorrent or ipfs? Not that I am condoning it, but I'm curious if it has been attempted. I searched but did not find anything.

hilbert42 10y ago

This is damn disgraceful (and that's about as respectable a comment I can make about it). The same atrocious behavior happens in Britain and commonwealth countries with Crown Copyright. For the life of me, why do we put up with this nonsense? We ought to be rioting in the streets over it until fixed. (It's little wonder our democracies are in such big trouble when so few of the citizenry actually care about atrocities committed against democracy by 'The State'.)