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Why would there be any issue at all with putting the law online? Serious question. What do, say, reporters in Georgia do when they write a story about court p

Why would there be any issue at all with putting the law online? Serious question. What do, say, reporters in Georgia do when they write a story about court proceedings or what-have-you? Is the state code just never referenced? Or explained? Or even just written out so that people can see what happened and how it worked? Is the general public simply not allowed to know what laws they live under? Or is it that only people authorized by the government are allowed to tell people what the law says? (Which, to me, sounds even more problematic.)

wpietri 8y ago
I think there are two complimentary things going on. In a "we the people" mindset, it's obviously dumb that citizens shoulnd't have full access to the law and anything needed to understand it. But if you're a dispositional authoritarian, then you like having power and serving those with more power. Rule of law runs counter to that, so dispositional authoritarians won't like making it easy for citizens to challenge or restrict their use of power. The other thing is that there are two approaches to commerce. One is where people relish a free-market competition. A lot of restaurant owners are like this: they are generally happy that other restaurants exist, and see other restaurant owners both as competitors and colleagues. But there's also what I think of as the crony capitalist mindset, where monopolies and exclusive sweetheart deals are the desired outcome. At least some, and perhaps a lot of government contracting is like this. Authoritarians give contracts to crony capitalists; crony capitalists give money and support to authoritarians. In that latter model, citizens are a resource to farm, not the ones who run the government. So of course anybody upsetting that cozy authoritarian approach would be seen as a terrorist.
shoes_for_thee 8y ago
This is addressed in the article.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  No it doesn't. It says that court decisions are always public. As are statutes. You can't, to my knowledge, render your court decisions "not" public, by simply referencing an annotation and then saying, "well, we have a contract with a publisher". This legal obligation cannot, to my knowledge, be contracted away. So what kind of contracting was done to make this happen? This is my question. How did they manage this so that a take down notice is suddenly legal, as opposed to explicitly illegal?
  - NoGravitas 8y ago
    So, the gist of it is that while the court decisions are public, things written about the court decisions, like news articles, may be copyrighted. The state of Georgia claims that this is the status of the annotations written by Lexis-Nexis. Clearly, this shouldn't be possible: a work contracted by the state is a work by the state (ie a work for hire), and should be public domain. But there's money involved, and that tends to be the deciding factor in legal decisions in the US.
cptskippy 8y ago
I think the issue is that it's out of their control. You can access the Georgia laws online however they're in an incredibly hard to use/search/read format from a Lexus Nexus portal they pay to have hosted but which gives them complete control of the content.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  But legal obligations to the people cannot be contracted away. Court decisions are public. Statutes are public. Again, to my knowledge, (which must obviously be limited), you cannot contract away the right of people to access the law. Nor can the right of people to write, or comment on, the law be contracted away. You just can't contract away First Amendment rights. You can't say, "Well, we have a publisher, so no writing or reporting on that." The government is explicitly forbidden from entering into any arrangement that would do that. What's in this contract that makes that legal? That's what we need to get to, because whatever it is making this behavior legal, it has to be removed. And it has to be made explicitly illegal by the Supremes. (You wouldn't think you'd need to do that, but there's always a few politicians everywhere who can't be trusted to act in good faith.)

wpietri 8y ago

I think there are two complimentary things going on. In a "we the people" mindset, it's obviously dumb that citizens shoulnd't have full access to the law and anything needed to understand it. But if you're a dispositional authoritarian, then you like having power and serving those with more power. Rule of law runs counter to that, so dispositional authoritarians won't like making it easy for citizens to challenge or restrict their use of power. The other thing is that there are two approaches to commerce. One is where people relish a free-market competition. A lot of restaurant owners are like this: they are generally happy that other restaurants exist, and see other restaurant owners both as competitors and colleagues. But there's also what I think of as the crony capitalist mindset, where monopolies and exclusive sweetheart deals are the desired outcome. At least some, and perhaps a lot of government contracting is like this. Authoritarians give contracts to crony capitalists; crony capitalists give money and support to authoritarians. In that latter model, citizens are a resource to farm, not the ones who run the government. So of course anybody upsetting that cozy authoritarian approach would be seen as a terrorist.

shoes_for_thee 8y ago

This is addressed in the article.

bilbo0s 8y ago
No it doesn't. It says that court decisions are always public. As are statutes. You can't, to my knowledge, render your court decisions "not" public, by simply referencing an annotation and then saying, "well, we have a contract with a publisher". This legal obligation cannot, to my knowledge, be contracted away. So what kind of contracting was done to make this happen? This is my question. How did they manage this so that a take down notice is suddenly legal, as opposed to explicitly illegal?
- NoGravitas 8y ago
  So, the gist of it is that while the court decisions are public, things written about the court decisions, like news articles, may be copyrighted. The state of Georgia claims that this is the status of the annotations written by Lexis-Nexis. Clearly, this shouldn't be possible: a work contracted by the state is a work by the state (ie a work for hire), and should be public domain. But there's money involved, and that tends to be the deciding factor in legal decisions in the US.

cptskippy 8y ago

I think the issue is that it's out of their control. You can access the Georgia laws online however they're in an incredibly hard to use/search/read format from a Lexus Nexus portal they pay to have hosted but which gives them complete control of the content.

bilbo0s 8y ago
But legal obligations to the people cannot be contracted away. Court decisions are public. Statutes are public. Again, to my knowledge, (which must obviously be limited), you cannot contract away the right of people to access the law. Nor can the right of people to write, or comment on, the law be contracted away. You just can't contract away First Amendment rights. You can't say, "Well, we have a publisher, so no writing or reporting on that." The government is explicitly forbidden from entering into any arrangement that would do that. What's in this contract that makes that legal? That's what we need to get to, because whatever it is making this behavior legal, it has to be removed. And it has to be made explicitly illegal by the Supremes. (You wouldn't think you'd need to do that, but there's always a few politicians everywhere who can't be trusted to act in good faith.)