7 ms·

Many of us love to pat ourselves on the back for all the "free" knowledge and information available thanks to the internet, ignoring that most of what is availa

by dvdhnt 9y ago

Many of us love to pat ourselves on the back for all the "free" knowledge and information available thanks to the internet, ignoring that most of what is available is merely entertainment and opinion. Stories like this are a good reminder that the most valuable information is still being concealed by those with the power. They use their position, money, and authority to protect it at all costs. We still have a long way to go.

manigandham 9y ago
Long way to go until what exactly?
- ramy_d 9y ago
  Until relevant information is free.
  - killjoywashere 9y ago
    All information is relevant to someone, somewhere, who doesn't already know. We all have secrets.
- dvdhnt 9y ago
  Until organizations who should act transparently can no longer impede the free-flow of information, because as they have proven time and time again, they cannot be trusted to do so willingly.
- heymijo 9y ago
  I'm grasping at straws, but it seems relevant to this branch of the thread... Wasn't there recently an uproar in the U.S. about a [state/municipality/or some such] that gave copyright over to their [regulations/building codes/or some such] to a private entity? Thus, citizens had to pay to know what the law was and couldn't make copies. This seems right along the lines of what op was talking about. My memory is too fuzzy to get a good search result so if anyone could help out with the specifics I would appreciate it.
  - nobodyorother 9y ago
    It was Georgia state law, two years ago, essentially saying that while you can have the text of the law, you can't have the annotations that inform the interpretation of the law: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-activist-violated-copyright-by-publishing-georgia-legal-code-online/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-a... However, since court decisions about US law are based on prior rulings, the text itself is mostly useless and doesn't actually tell you what the whole law is. It's like an Ikea assembly manual without pictures.
  - mikeyouse 9y ago
    There have been several cases, mostly along building standards, but the state of Georgia famously sued Carl Malamud for infringing on the copyright of state laws when he publishing the full annotated version of their laws online: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-state-of-georgia-copyright-wall-20150727-column.html http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-state-of-ge... Malamud had worked with Aaron Swartz on opening up Pacer: https://public.resource.org/crime/ https://public.resource.org/crime/ And he was joined by the EFF defending against a suit by the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors Association after he published the details of a Federally-mandated safety standard: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-prevails-free-speech-case-over-publishing-safety-standards https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-prevail...
  - apendleton 9y ago
    So there are a couple different issues here. One is just states claiming copyright on their actual state criminal code or whatever, and selling the rights to republish it to Lexis or WestLaw or whatever as a state revenue source. This is happens, but is not actually that common in the US, and there's pretty broad agreement that it's shitty, and it doesn't happen at the federal level because the US federal government can't own copyrights. Much trickier is "incorporation by reference," which is when the official law or regulation says "as part of our building codes we're going to adopt the 2012 version of the International Building Code in its entirety, and then amend it as follows..." without actually including the text of the IBC (or the fire code, or whatever), which is a document created by a private entity, and is copyrighted. This happens all the time, across levels of government, and it pretty clearly poses a problem, but it's not really clear whose fault it is or what to do about it. Individual city governments don't have the requisite expertise to concoct an entire set of fire codes for themselves, and it's not clear you'd want them to: we arguably all benefit from having the greatest experts in the country craft the best possible code, and product makers that sell across markets benefit from having a uniform standard. But because professional associations end up taking on this role since no single government will, it's not clear how to pay for the work of researching and writing the code, so they end up self-funding by selling the text itself. It's not clear that either the governments or the organizations are in the wrong, even if the public ends up suffering.
jxramos 9y ago
Pretty scary thought; makes me think about the Magna Carta and the idea that you couldn't be pulled into a court and charged for things not explicitly spelled out in some body of law that folks could possibly know in advance. In other words administrative bodies could not produce some novel "law" on the spot and charge you with it. I long to see the day when laws and other civic documents are compiled and evolved in some source control like git or something domain specific for such documents.
- pc86 9y ago
  This "git for law" meme is a nearly constant refrain but it is simply not appropriate for legal text. Yes, for de minimus yet important changes, like changing a "shall" to a "may," it makes sense. For anything beyond that, trying to shoehorn legislation into a format and workflow design for software is a fool's errand at best.
  - KingPrad 9y ago
    I disagree that version control is inappropriate. I worked for a company whose primary product was tracking government legislation through a database built on Subversion. (acted as a DB but used Subversion for a variety of reasons. I know it sounds strange). It seemed to work fine to record incremental changes, tag specific revisions as being checkpoints for various stages of review and approvals. And anyone could search current and historical versions. The overall legislation system needs flexibility to deal with complex and changing workflows, but storing documents (with change over time) and the links between them can be encoded just fine. As long as there are flexible ways to string them together, they can be represented in whatever structure makes sense: final law with all current amendments; original law, with amendments as annotations, separate pieces of legislation, linked by the overall law, etc. None of that has to be encoded in a super-strict heirarchy, but as long as it's all being stored in can be presented however one wants. I don't see the fatal flaw. I see imperfections and compromises, but not the flaw so bad as to say "don't bother".
    - jxramos 9y ago
Chathamization 9y ago
That's true, but there's still a ton of useful information freely available out there that gets ignored. For the vast majority of people the problem isn't lack of access to information that the government is concealing, but rather lack of interest in useful information they can access in seconds. That's not to say that lack of access isn't a major problem - it is - but even when you solve that, you're going to be left with the much bigger lack of interest problem.
- Markoff 9y ago
  i don't think the problem is really lack of interest, but form in what is information delivered. if you give me 200 pages text document ful of numbers, nobody will bother to read it, if you make simple infographic based on this document you will see people are interested
  - abakker 9y ago
    In other words, if you do the analysis and the work, and provide the opinion and results for free?
    - lovich 9y ago
      What you said is technically true, but it is literally impossible for someone to be up to date on every piece of information that affects them. Even just limiting the domain to legal terms, the US government doesn't know how many laws it has. How is someone supposed to "do the analysis and work" on all of that, on all of the terms of services for every single product that exists, all the information pertinent to their health, for companies they never even consented to work with ala Facebook and Equifax data tracking, etc? It's extremely disingenuous to call people lazy for not analyzing all of that when there is not a single person on the planet who has done so
- specialist 9y ago
  Steep learning curve. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on, much less figuring how how to ask useful questions.
hellbanner 9y ago
May I interest you in the Black Iron Prison: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php http://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php

by dvdhnt 9y ago

manigandham 9y ago

Long way to go until what exactly?

ramy_d 9y ago
Until relevant information is free.
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  All information is relevant to someone, somewhere, who doesn't already know. We all have secrets.
dvdhnt 9y ago
Until organizations who should act transparently can no longer impede the free-flow of information, because as they have proven time and time again, they cannot be trusted to do so willingly.
heymijo 9y ago
I'm grasping at straws, but it seems relevant to this branch of the thread... Wasn't there recently an uproar in the U.S. about a [state/municipality/or some such] that gave copyright over to their [regulations/building codes/or some such] to a private entity? Thus, citizens had to pay to know what the law was and couldn't make copies. This seems right along the lines of what op was talking about. My memory is too fuzzy to get a good search result so if anyone could help out with the specifics I would appreciate it.
- nobodyorother 9y ago
  It was Georgia state law, two years ago, essentially saying that while you can have the text of the law, you can't have the annotations that inform the interpretation of the law: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-activist-violated-copyright-by-publishing-georgia-legal-code-online/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-a... However, since court decisions about US law are based on prior rulings, the text itself is mostly useless and doesn't actually tell you what the whole law is. It's like an Ikea assembly manual without pictures.
- mikeyouse 9y ago
  There have been several cases, mostly along building standards, but the state of Georgia famously sued Carl Malamud for infringing on the copyright of state laws when he publishing the full annotated version of their laws online: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-state-of-georgia-copyright-wall-20150727-column.html http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-state-of-ge... Malamud had worked with Aaron Swartz on opening up Pacer: https://public.resource.org/crime/ https://public.resource.org/crime/ And he was joined by the EFF defending against a suit by the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors Association after he published the details of a Federally-mandated safety standard: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-prevails-free-speech-case-over-publishing-safety-standards https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-prevail...
- apendleton 9y ago
  So there are a couple different issues here. One is just states claiming copyright on their actual state criminal code or whatever, and selling the rights to republish it to Lexis or WestLaw or whatever as a state revenue source. This is happens, but is not actually that common in the US, and there's pretty broad agreement that it's shitty, and it doesn't happen at the federal level because the US federal government can't own copyrights. Much trickier is "incorporation by reference," which is when the official law or regulation says "as part of our building codes we're going to adopt the 2012 version of the International Building Code in its entirety, and then amend it as follows..." without actually including the text of the IBC (or the fire code, or whatever), which is a document created by a private entity, and is copyrighted. This happens all the time, across levels of government, and it pretty clearly poses a problem, but it's not really clear whose fault it is or what to do about it. Individual city governments don't have the requisite expertise to concoct an entire set of fire codes for themselves, and it's not clear you'd want them to: we arguably all benefit from having the greatest experts in the country craft the best possible code, and product makers that sell across markets benefit from having a uniform standard. But because professional associations end up taking on this role since no single government will, it's not clear how to pay for the work of researching and writing the code, so they end up self-funding by selling the text itself. It's not clear that either the governments or the organizations are in the wrong, even if the public ends up suffering.

jxramos 9y ago

Pretty scary thought; makes me think about the Magna Carta and the idea that you couldn't be pulled into a court and charged for things not explicitly spelled out in some body of law that folks could possibly know in advance. In other words administrative bodies could not produce some novel "law" on the spot and charge you with it. I long to see the day when laws and other civic documents are compiled and evolved in some source control like git or something domain specific for such documents.

pc86 9y ago
This "git for law" meme is a nearly constant refrain but it is simply not appropriate for legal text. Yes, for de minimus yet important changes, like changing a "shall" to a "may," it makes sense. For anything beyond that, trying to shoehorn legislation into a format and workflow design for software is a fool's errand at best.
- KingPrad 9y ago
  I disagree that version control is inappropriate. I worked for a company whose primary product was tracking government legislation through a database built on Subversion. (acted as a DB but used Subversion for a variety of reasons. I know it sounds strange). It seemed to work fine to record incremental changes, tag specific revisions as being checkpoints for various stages of review and approvals. And anyone could search current and historical versions. The overall legislation system needs flexibility to deal with complex and changing workflows, but storing documents (with change over time) and the links between them can be encoded just fine. As long as there are flexible ways to string them together, they can be represented in whatever structure makes sense: final law with all current amendments; original law, with amendments as annotations, separate pieces of legislation, linked by the overall law, etc. None of that has to be encoded in a super-strict heirarchy, but as long as it's all being stored in can be presented however one wants. I don't see the fatal flaw. I see imperfections and compromises, but not the flaw so bad as to say "don't bother".
  - jxramos 9y ago

Chathamization 9y ago

That's true, but there's still a ton of useful information freely available out there that gets ignored. For the vast majority of people the problem isn't lack of access to information that the government is concealing, but rather lack of interest in useful information they can access in seconds. That's not to say that lack of access isn't a major problem - it is - but even when you solve that, you're going to be left with the much bigger lack of interest problem.

Markoff 9y ago
i don't think the problem is really lack of interest, but form in what is information delivered. if you give me 200 pages text document ful of numbers, nobody will bother to read it, if you make simple infographic based on this document you will see people are interested
- abakker 9y ago
  In other words, if you do the analysis and the work, and provide the opinion and results for free?
  - lovich 9y ago
    What you said is technically true, but it is literally impossible for someone to be up to date on every piece of information that affects them. Even just limiting the domain to legal terms, the US government doesn't know how many laws it has. How is someone supposed to "do the analysis and work" on all of that, on all of the terms of services for every single product that exists, all the information pertinent to their health, for companies they never even consented to work with ala Facebook and Equifax data tracking, etc? It's extremely disingenuous to call people lazy for not analyzing all of that when there is not a single person on the planet who has done so
specialist 9y ago
Steep learning curve. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on, much less figuring how how to ask useful questions.

hellbanner 9y ago

May I interest you in the Black Iron Prison: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php http://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php