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>If I wrote a textbook which explains some badly written and archaic laws really well, and lawyers and judges started to look to it as the de facto law, should
by inflatableDodo 7y ago
>If I wrote a textbook which explains some badly written and archaic laws really well, and lawyers and judges started to look to it as the de facto law, should that void my copyright?
Given copyright only exists under the law, in the rare case that this happens, a sensible fudge would be to make a compulsary purchase of the copyright for the assessed market value, so it can become public domain. Much in the same way as you would do for any other property when you need to build municipal infrastructure through it. The law is essentially municipal infrastructure anywazy, so it isn't that much of a legal stretch.
- torstenvl 7y agoThis is not a "rare case" at all. Judicial opinions frequently cite private materials such as the Restatements, law review articles, Black's Law Dictionary, paywalled scientific literature, and so on.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoAre the Restatements, law review articles, Black's Law Dictionary and the paywalled scientific literature cited then 'de facto law'?
- torstenvl 7y agoThe Restatements and Black's are, yes. Law review articles - maybe, depending on context. Scientific understanding rarely gets encoded in the law as such, but see Roe v. Wade as an example - the trimester-based legal framework has given legal effect to a particular understanding of fetal viability. Side-note: I don't really care that my above post has been downvoted, but it seems pretty counter-productive to the HN cultural goal of intellectual discourse for people to downvote input from actual practitioners in the field just because they don't like the answer.