>There is no good whatsoever in hindering people from copying, distributing, publicly performing, or creating derived works from existing laws or regulations.

>There is no good whatsoever in hindering people from copying, distributing, publicly performing, or creating derived works from existing laws or regulations. This isn't true. Let's say we decide that our copyright registry requires the submission of a full work to the government for archival purposes so we can compare a given work against the registered copyright. We'd obviously want someone to be able to check the register, but not gain the right to print someone else's registered work for sale commercially. If we didn't have any hindering, we couldn't actually run the registry at all! The discussion here presupposes that all works which relate to regulations or laws do not have any independent value outside of their legal function, which isn't necessarily the case. That said, when it comes to the text of legislation or a building code, your assumptions hold true. Just don't design a policy solution ignoring the other edge cases, though :).