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Public.Resource.Org has been leading a (mostly?) one-man crusade that holds that any standard that is referenced by a U.S. law can no longer be copyrighted. The

Public.Resource.Org has been leading a (mostly?) one-man crusade that holds that any standard that is referenced by a U.S. law can no longer be copyrighted. They have had mixed success in court. Here's an example (with signature cover sheet): https://law.resource.org/pub/us/cfr/ibr/004/iso.6406.2005.pdf https://law.resource.org/pub/us/cfr/ibr/004/iso.6406.2005.pd...

black_puppydog 6y ago
So I'm not gonna disagree with that, but playing devils advocate here for a moment... Doesn't that mean that by virtue of referencing a standard in a US law, congress unilaterally voids the copyright holder's claims? I wonder how that would go down if the Belgian government decided to reference a song text by a US artist in a law and then claimed that copyright no longer applies to this song in Belgium.
- samus 6y ago
  In a republic, law must be public. If a law references a document that cannot be accessed with the same ease as the law itself, it creates barries for heeding it correctly. I must be able to go to a library or an online platform and look it up with the same ease as the law itself. Everything else would result in a Kafkaesque system where the true version is only known to the elites, and probably doesn't even exist as such.
  - adolph 6y ago
    > In a republic, law must be public Let’s say you’re a volunteer firefighter and you want to buy a copy of the California fire code and copy it for your fellow volunteers. By doing so, you’re breaking the law, according to the state; each of them would have to buy it separately from a national fire safety organization, for a couple of hundred dollars a shot. [...] When Malamud asked the Office of Administrative Law to provide an up-to-date electronic version of almost the entire Code of Regulations, it responded that it didn’t have such a version in its possession. The office said it could provide Malamud with a paper copy of the code’s 38 volumes, at 20 cents a page. There are 29,000 pages. If he required a digital version, the office would scan its own paper copy into a digital file for a much higher, albeit unspecified, price, payable in advance. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-03-18/state-laws-copyrighted https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-03-18/state-laws...
    - masklinn 6y ago
      > The office said it could provide Malamud with a paper copy of the code’s 38 volumes, at 20 cents a page. There are 29,000 pages. If he required a digital version, the office would scan its own paper copy into a digital file for a much higher, albeit unspecified, price, payable in advance. TBF that one requesting information would bear the costs of that request does make sense, for instance FOIA requesters may get charged the costs of searching, collecting, and copying the records they're asking for. One could debate the price of 20c a page, but if they are bound books to be copied page by page, the price is if anything low: at 10s a page it's 2 weeks, full time, for an employee. If it's a bunch of binder and there's a copy machine which can be fed piles of loose pages then it's bullshit. Such an administration would have access to relatively large-scale copier, the CPP of which can't be above 10c, and likely is below 5c.
      - rlpb 6y ago
        > TBF that one requesting information would bear the costs of that request does make sense, for instance FOIA requesters may get charged the costs of searching, collecting, and copying the records they're asking for. After paying the $5800 requested, would it then be legal to scan and distribute the lot online for free? If not, then the "bear the costs of that request" claim would not be legitimate. I don't know the answer, but I think this is central to the issue.
        masklinn 6y ago
        > After paying the $5800 requested, would it then be legal to scan and distribute the lot online for free? According to the original article no, and that I completely agree is a problem. > If not, then the "bear the costs of that request" claim would not be legitimate. Of course it would, this and that are unrelated issues.
      - freeopinion 6y ago
        The requestor should not bear the burden for scanning in the documents. The state needs a digital copy no matter what. They should bear the cost of obtaining that. The requester should bear the burden of making a copy of the digital document. 29000 pages--even at 2MB/page--would require < 64GB of storage. So, about 15USD for a thumb drive. Or put the document on the website where it belongs, and eat the cost of storage and data transfer just like you do with all your other state-run websites.
  - cma 6y ago
    Case law is often as important as written law, and is often heavily paywalled.
  - young_unixer 6y ago
    I agree, but it's the law that should refrain itself from referencing closed standards, not the standard that should open itself because the law references it.
    - Iv 6y ago
      Either way is fine in my book. But obeying the law should not incur costs to actually know what the law is.
  - elihu 6y ago
    It seems to me that the most straightforward remedy is that whenever a law references standards that aren't publicly available, then noncompliance with that standard cannot be punished. Or at least, the portion of the standard that matters must be communicated to either the noncomplying party or the public at large before anyone can be held responsible for noncompliance.
    - mindslight 6y ago
      The problem with relying on that remedy is you're never going to get a test case to demonstrate it. You'll run up against inspectors arbitrarily denying approval, insurance companies enforcing the codes as "private" companies, local courts that care more about the status quo than the injustice of privatized law, etc. Even the tradespeople that would seemingly save the most from such a change actually benefit by keeping their field's knowledge obscure. A better way of looking at this is these standards bodies have deliberately worked to get their codes incorporated into law. By being willful participants in the lawmaking process, they've accepted their work entering the public domain. This is analogous to other private organizations drafting legal codes (eg the Uniform Law Commission) and even legislators themselves.
  - gumby 6y ago
    > In a republic, law must be public. Apparently in the United States, an avowed republic, you are subject to classified laws which cannot be discussed in open court. See, for example, Gilmore v. Gonzales
    - kube-system 6y ago
      Meh, neither airline policy nor executive policy is law, even if the CSR at the check-in desk confuses policy with law.
      - gumby 6y ago
        The courts have been very clear that US administrative law is law, and that subject was not in question in that case. The dismissal was on the basis that the law could not be discussed in open court thus the law stands. The individual policies of the airlines was not in question.
  - solidsnack9000 6y ago
    Maybe it should simply be affordably accessible. Nothing in life is really free.
  - zie 6y ago
    Building codes seems to be one such example where this is pretty uniformly NOT true... sadly.
    - MAGZine 6y ago
      my friend garrett owns a startup called up.codes that is working to change that. some recent breakthroughs in copyright law litigation mean that people can actually publish the text of these codes online.
  - m12k 6y ago
    You're right, which is why the only sane way for this to work is for any law referencing a copyrighted work needs to be considered unconstitutional. Lawmakers need to either get the copyright holder to release it to the public domain, explicitly void the copyright of the work in the new law themselves, or have their law rejected by the supreme court.
- jolmg 6y ago
  > by virtue of referencing a standard in a US law, congress unilaterally voids the copyright holder's claims Well, that's not the only option. They could also buy the copyright or a perpetual license for the public or remove the references from the law. I would think that ideally getting perpetual free access for the public should have been done before referencing the standard.
  - souprock 6y ago
    Another option is that the law isn't valid.
    - jolmg 6y ago
      What, like make a law that says that laws that make reference to works that aren't freely available to the public aren't valid? I'm no lawyer, so I don't know if there's a way to make a law invalidate another, other than by putting it in the constitution as an amendment.
      - masklinn 6y ago
        > I'm no lawyer, so I don't know if there's a way to make a law invalidate another, other than by putting it in the constitution as an amendment. Congress needs exemptions to not be affected by the laws they pass e.g. OSHA specifically exempts the US (and thus congress). Which means congress could pass a law preventing themselves from passing certain laws. Though of course they could always repeal it first, I wouldn't think "unrepealable" laws would be constitutional.
        gsjjsjsbsb 6y ago
        Congress cannot pass a law that binds future Congresses, the supreme court decided in Winstar (https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/95-865.ZO.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/95-865.ZO.html) A later congress can always legislate whatever it wants, even if it contradicts previous legislation.
- alerighi 6y ago
  And look at the other side. If this wasn't true, a law can reference a copyrighted material sold to a ridiculous price.
- gpm 6y ago
  Surely the Belgian government is free to decide how to enforce copyright law within Belgium? It's not like copyright is the same the world over. I'm from Canada for instance, and we have very different fair use (fair dealing) laws from the US, different copyright terms, etc.
  - masklinn 6y ago
    > Surely the Belgian government is free to decide how to enforce copyright law within Belgium? Only to the extent that it doesn't conflict with their international obligation pertaining to the subject: in the hierachy of law, international treaties generally stand above national laws. It's a bit more complicated when it comes to the US, because internally the country has 3 different concepts corresponding to international treaties: treaties in the constitutional sense (covered by the treaty clause), congressional agreements, and executive agreements. The differences are: * executive agreements (a treaty agreed to by the executive alone) stands below federal law, and can not contradict it (to say nothing of the constitution) * congressional agreements are essentially regular laws, and thus restricted to the enumerated powers of Congress and the Executive * "constitutional" treaties can expand beyond the enumerated powers
    - gowld 6y ago
      A treaty is national law, that by convention, matches other nation's laws. There is no world government, only peer government's guns and bombs.
    - 420codebro 6y ago
      Interesting. I figured treaties would need to be compatible with current law to be valid.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Any government can decide to make some work public domain. Other governments may not agree, and it may be a breach of international treaty, but it's their choice to make. What is a completely separated issue from all laws needing to be public in a democracy. Once it's a law, there's no going back. So if the government is serious about intellectual property, what remains is only the option of saying "well, somebody fucked up somewhere here" and paying damages to the copyright owner.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  It's an interesting question, a standard is factual - the owner can retain the rights to the rendering, but the content is not covered by copyright anyway. If it's technical, it's not covered by copyright. Copyright is for artistic works, according to international treaty, the standard owners get to keep the artistic aspects of their rendering; anything factual -- such as technical details of a standard -- is fair game ... of course you have to convince the court of that purposive construction rather than the more popular [with some] financial construction of copyright law. > reference a song text by a US artist // Somewhat aside: the artist probably doesn't own the copyright and in any case a text of the lyrics is not the song. It's very likely that different people own the lyrics and the performance by an artist (and probably not the artist if it's a mass-media released track/song). So the artist would still get their copyright in the performance and could still collect on that; the songwriter might be aggrieved though ... it seems super unlikely to ever be an issue. There are already USC that allow reporting on court cases, presumably if a copyright work is played in court then that rendering can be duplicated without infringement. New Zealand courts played Eminem's "Lose Yourself" (https://scroll.in/video/836700/watch-what-happens-or-doesnt-when-eminems-music-takes-over-a-courtroom; https://scroll.in/video/836700/watch-what-happens-or-doesnt-... linked from this story, direct link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPcB5IlIILc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPcB5IlIILc).
  - mindslight 6y ago
    > If it's technical, it's not covered by copyright There is a distinction between factual and technical. The technical parts of standards are ultimately judgement calls, not straight facts. By your standard, software copyrights couldn't exist. Not that this would be a bad thing...
- surfsvammel 6y ago
  I’ve heard that large amount of secrect Scientology texts where mailed to some part of the Swedish government anonymously. And, as anything handled by the government is public, those documents where then public for all Swedish citizen. Not sure if it is just a random myth or if it is true.
  - freeopinion 6y ago
    This is obviously a myth. If somebody mails a DVD of "Godzilla vs King Kong" to a government employee, it doesn't place the movie into the public domain.
    - Taniwha 6y ago
      Not a myth, in Sweden at the time it was the law, Scientology's "all your problems are caused because you are haunted by murdered space aliens" secret was put in the public domain this way
    - gowld 6y ago
      Not public domain, but 1 copy available for reference like in a library.
      - freeopinion 6y ago
        That is an interesting take. If somebody robbed a bank and gave the money to the state, the state would obviously need to return it to its rightful owner. But copyright is not so straight forward. The church could contest that the physical copy belonged to them and was on loan. Thus it could not be gifted legally. The church could claim that the physical document was licensed non-transferably. They could claim that the copy itself was against copyright. There could be lots of arguments they could make to suppress the document. But none seem so straight forward as the bank robbery example.
      - 3np 6y ago
        Actually in general, you can ask for a copy of any document, for a somewhat reasonable copying/handling fee, and have it sent to you. If somebody’s hogging the book all day it can’t be copied as much, though...
- mcguire 6y ago
  If the song contains statutory requirements, that's probably fair. The Belgians would have to pay the artist, maybe.
- criddell 6y ago
  If they would pay the copyright holder some defensible amount, then it could be the IP version of eminent domain.
- djoldman 6y ago
  This is interesting. I think the way this should work is that that the government should have to license the standard from the creator. This makes sense because they have to have the standard to know to reference it and should only have obtained it legally, for one. Then the creator is free to charge the government what they like.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  The laws protecting copyright are made by Congress in the first place, that's where they come from. Of course Congress has the power to take away copyright too, so there's nothing odd about the fact that an act of Congress (the same entity that created the right) can void a copyright. (OK, ok, some of copyright law, at least originally, is common law, but Congress always has the power to override that too).
  - gowld 6y ago
    That's not quite true. Copyright is in the Constitution, controlled by the States.
    - jrochkind1 6y ago
      Copyright law is definitely definitely federal. There are no state-by-state differences to copyright in the USA, it is exclusively federal. You are right the constitution gives the federal government (not the states) the authority to create it. Article 1 Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power… To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
- ipaddr 6y ago
  In this case only the lyrics would be open not the song itself. That sounds fair.
- blendergeek 6y ago
  And what if the copyright holder lobbied for the inclusion by reference of the copyrighted work into the law? Does this change the calculus at all?
- franga2000 6y ago
  Maybe not a Ctrl+F interpretation of "mentioned in a law", but yes, definitely - if something is required by legislation, all copyright, patents, etc. should be void. If the government requires product category X to be developed to the spec of standard Y and standard Y is a closed standard, that law should either be invalidated or the standard should be opened. If a hypothetical government required all citizens to read a specific book, that book better be royalty-free to distribute.
- rrobukef 6y ago
  For Belgium (maybe even Europe), yes, the Belgian government can and has decided to void international copyright law in specific instances. Source: https://thebelgianscientist.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/belgian-copyright-law-amended-in-favor-of-open-access-to-scientific-articles/ https://thebelgianscientist.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/belgian... In short: For a scientific article and after a waiting period of 6 to 12 months, copyright is voided and the article can be published in open access REGARDLESS of previous copyright agreements.

black_puppydog 6y ago

So I'm not gonna disagree with that, but playing devils advocate here for a moment... Doesn't that mean that by virtue of referencing a standard in a US law, congress unilaterally voids the copyright holder's claims? I wonder how that would go down if the Belgian government decided to reference a song text by a US artist in a law and then claimed that copyright no longer applies to this song in Belgium.

samus 6y ago
In a republic, law must be public. If a law references a document that cannot be accessed with the same ease as the law itself, it creates barries for heeding it correctly. I must be able to go to a library or an online platform and look it up with the same ease as the law itself. Everything else would result in a Kafkaesque system where the true version is only known to the elites, and probably doesn't even exist as such.
- adolph 6y ago
  > In a republic, law must be public Let’s say you’re a volunteer firefighter and you want to buy a copy of the California fire code and copy it for your fellow volunteers. By doing so, you’re breaking the law, according to the state; each of them would have to buy it separately from a national fire safety organization, for a couple of hundred dollars a shot. [...] When Malamud asked the Office of Administrative Law to provide an up-to-date electronic version of almost the entire Code of Regulations, it responded that it didn’t have such a version in its possession. The office said it could provide Malamud with a paper copy of the code’s 38 volumes, at 20 cents a page. There are 29,000 pages. If he required a digital version, the office would scan its own paper copy into a digital file for a much higher, albeit unspecified, price, payable in advance. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-03-18/state-laws-copyrighted https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-03-18/state-laws...
  - masklinn 6y ago
    > The office said it could provide Malamud with a paper copy of the code’s 38 volumes, at 20 cents a page. There are 29,000 pages. If he required a digital version, the office would scan its own paper copy into a digital file for a much higher, albeit unspecified, price, payable in advance. TBF that one requesting information would bear the costs of that request does make sense, for instance FOIA requesters may get charged the costs of searching, collecting, and copying the records they're asking for. One could debate the price of 20c a page, but if they are bound books to be copied page by page, the price is if anything low: at 10s a page it's 2 weeks, full time, for an employee. If it's a bunch of binder and there's a copy machine which can be fed piles of loose pages then it's bullshit. Such an administration would have access to relatively large-scale copier, the CPP of which can't be above 10c, and likely is below 5c.
    - rlpb 6y ago
      > TBF that one requesting information would bear the costs of that request does make sense, for instance FOIA requesters may get charged the costs of searching, collecting, and copying the records they're asking for. After paying the $5800 requested, would it then be legal to scan and distribute the lot online for free? If not, then the "bear the costs of that request" claim would not be legitimate. I don't know the answer, but I think this is central to the issue.
      - masklinn 6y ago
        > After paying the $5800 requested, would it then be legal to scan and distribute the lot online for free? According to the original article no, and that I completely agree is a problem. > If not, then the "bear the costs of that request" claim would not be legitimate. Of course it would, this and that are unrelated issues.
    - freeopinion 6y ago
      The requestor should not bear the burden for scanning in the documents. The state needs a digital copy no matter what. They should bear the cost of obtaining that. The requester should bear the burden of making a copy of the digital document. 29000 pages--even at 2MB/page--would require < 64GB of storage. So, about 15USD for a thumb drive. Or put the document on the website where it belongs, and eat the cost of storage and data transfer just like you do with all your other state-run websites.
- cma 6y ago
  Case law is often as important as written law, and is often heavily paywalled.
- young_unixer 6y ago
  I agree, but it's the law that should refrain itself from referencing closed standards, not the standard that should open itself because the law references it.
  - Iv 6y ago
    Either way is fine in my book. But obeying the law should not incur costs to actually know what the law is.
- elihu 6y ago
  It seems to me that the most straightforward remedy is that whenever a law references standards that aren't publicly available, then noncompliance with that standard cannot be punished. Or at least, the portion of the standard that matters must be communicated to either the noncomplying party or the public at large before anyone can be held responsible for noncompliance.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    The problem with relying on that remedy is you're never going to get a test case to demonstrate it. You'll run up against inspectors arbitrarily denying approval, insurance companies enforcing the codes as "private" companies, local courts that care more about the status quo than the injustice of privatized law, etc. Even the tradespeople that would seemingly save the most from such a change actually benefit by keeping their field's knowledge obscure. A better way of looking at this is these standards bodies have deliberately worked to get their codes incorporated into law. By being willful participants in the lawmaking process, they've accepted their work entering the public domain. This is analogous to other private organizations drafting legal codes (eg the Uniform Law Commission) and even legislators themselves.
- gumby 6y ago
  > In a republic, law must be public. Apparently in the United States, an avowed republic, you are subject to classified laws which cannot be discussed in open court. See, for example, Gilmore v. Gonzales
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Meh, neither airline policy nor executive policy is law, even if the CSR at the check-in desk confuses policy with law.
    - gumby 6y ago
      The courts have been very clear that US administrative law is law, and that subject was not in question in that case. The dismissal was on the basis that the law could not be discussed in open court thus the law stands. The individual policies of the airlines was not in question.
- solidsnack9000 6y ago
  Maybe it should simply be affordably accessible. Nothing in life is really free.
- zie 6y ago
  Building codes seems to be one such example where this is pretty uniformly NOT true... sadly.
  - MAGZine 6y ago
    my friend garrett owns a startup called up.codes that is working to change that. some recent breakthroughs in copyright law litigation mean that people can actually publish the text of these codes online.
- m12k 6y ago
  You're right, which is why the only sane way for this to work is for any law referencing a copyrighted work needs to be considered unconstitutional. Lawmakers need to either get the copyright holder to release it to the public domain, explicitly void the copyright of the work in the new law themselves, or have their law rejected by the supreme court.
jolmg 6y ago
> by virtue of referencing a standard in a US law, congress unilaterally voids the copyright holder's claims Well, that's not the only option. They could also buy the copyright or a perpetual license for the public or remove the references from the law. I would think that ideally getting perpetual free access for the public should have been done before referencing the standard.
- souprock 6y ago
  Another option is that the law isn't valid.
  - jolmg 6y ago
    What, like make a law that says that laws that make reference to works that aren't freely available to the public aren't valid? I'm no lawyer, so I don't know if there's a way to make a law invalidate another, other than by putting it in the constitution as an amendment.
    - masklinn 6y ago
      > I'm no lawyer, so I don't know if there's a way to make a law invalidate another, other than by putting it in the constitution as an amendment. Congress needs exemptions to not be affected by the laws they pass e.g. OSHA specifically exempts the US (and thus congress). Which means congress could pass a law preventing themselves from passing certain laws. Though of course they could always repeal it first, I wouldn't think "unrepealable" laws would be constitutional.
      - gsjjsjsbsb 6y ago
        Congress cannot pass a law that binds future Congresses, the supreme court decided in Winstar (https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/95-865.ZO.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/95-865.ZO.html) A later congress can always legislate whatever it wants, even if it contradicts previous legislation.
alerighi 6y ago
And look at the other side. If this wasn't true, a law can reference a copyrighted material sold to a ridiculous price.
gpm 6y ago
Surely the Belgian government is free to decide how to enforce copyright law within Belgium? It's not like copyright is the same the world over. I'm from Canada for instance, and we have very different fair use (fair dealing) laws from the US, different copyright terms, etc.
- masklinn 6y ago
  > Surely the Belgian government is free to decide how to enforce copyright law within Belgium? Only to the extent that it doesn't conflict with their international obligation pertaining to the subject: in the hierachy of law, international treaties generally stand above national laws. It's a bit more complicated when it comes to the US, because internally the country has 3 different concepts corresponding to international treaties: treaties in the constitutional sense (covered by the treaty clause), congressional agreements, and executive agreements. The differences are: * executive agreements (a treaty agreed to by the executive alone) stands below federal law, and can not contradict it (to say nothing of the constitution) * congressional agreements are essentially regular laws, and thus restricted to the enumerated powers of Congress and the Executive * "constitutional" treaties can expand beyond the enumerated powers
  - gowld 6y ago
    A treaty is national law, that by convention, matches other nation's laws. There is no world government, only peer government's guns and bombs.
  - 420codebro 6y ago
    Interesting. I figured treaties would need to be compatible with current law to be valid.
marcosdumay 6y ago
Any government can decide to make some work public domain. Other governments may not agree, and it may be a breach of international treaty, but it's their choice to make. What is a completely separated issue from all laws needing to be public in a democracy. Once it's a law, there's no going back. So if the government is serious about intellectual property, what remains is only the option of saying "well, somebody fucked up somewhere here" and paying damages to the copyright owner.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
It's an interesting question, a standard is factual - the owner can retain the rights to the rendering, but the content is not covered by copyright anyway. If it's technical, it's not covered by copyright. Copyright is for artistic works, according to international treaty, the standard owners get to keep the artistic aspects of their rendering; anything factual -- such as technical details of a standard -- is fair game ... of course you have to convince the court of that purposive construction rather than the more popular [with some] financial construction of copyright law. > reference a song text by a US artist // Somewhat aside: the artist probably doesn't own the copyright and in any case a text of the lyrics is not the song. It's very likely that different people own the lyrics and the performance by an artist (and probably not the artist if it's a mass-media released track/song). So the artist would still get their copyright in the performance and could still collect on that; the songwriter might be aggrieved though ... it seems super unlikely to ever be an issue. There are already USC that allow reporting on court cases, presumably if a copyright work is played in court then that rendering can be duplicated without infringement. New Zealand courts played Eminem's "Lose Yourself" (https://scroll.in/video/836700/watch-what-happens-or-doesnt-when-eminems-music-takes-over-a-courtroom; https://scroll.in/video/836700/watch-what-happens-or-doesnt-... linked from this story, direct link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPcB5IlIILc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPcB5IlIILc).
- mindslight 6y ago
  > If it's technical, it's not covered by copyright There is a distinction between factual and technical. The technical parts of standards are ultimately judgement calls, not straight facts. By your standard, software copyrights couldn't exist. Not that this would be a bad thing...
surfsvammel 6y ago
I’ve heard that large amount of secrect Scientology texts where mailed to some part of the Swedish government anonymously. And, as anything handled by the government is public, those documents where then public for all Swedish citizen. Not sure if it is just a random myth or if it is true.
- freeopinion 6y ago
  This is obviously a myth. If somebody mails a DVD of "Godzilla vs King Kong" to a government employee, it doesn't place the movie into the public domain.
  - Taniwha 6y ago
    Not a myth, in Sweden at the time it was the law, Scientology's "all your problems are caused because you are haunted by murdered space aliens" secret was put in the public domain this way
  - gowld 6y ago
    Not public domain, but 1 copy available for reference like in a library.
    - freeopinion 6y ago
      That is an interesting take. If somebody robbed a bank and gave the money to the state, the state would obviously need to return it to its rightful owner. But copyright is not so straight forward. The church could contest that the physical copy belonged to them and was on loan. Thus it could not be gifted legally. The church could claim that the physical document was licensed non-transferably. They could claim that the copy itself was against copyright. There could be lots of arguments they could make to suppress the document. But none seem so straight forward as the bank robbery example.
    - 3np 6y ago
      Actually in general, you can ask for a copy of any document, for a somewhat reasonable copying/handling fee, and have it sent to you. If somebody’s hogging the book all day it can’t be copied as much, though...
mcguire 6y ago
If the song contains statutory requirements, that's probably fair. The Belgians would have to pay the artist, maybe.
criddell 6y ago
If they would pay the copyright holder some defensible amount, then it could be the IP version of eminent domain.
djoldman 6y ago
This is interesting. I think the way this should work is that that the government should have to license the standard from the creator. This makes sense because they have to have the standard to know to reference it and should only have obtained it legally, for one. Then the creator is free to charge the government what they like.
jrochkind1 6y ago
The laws protecting copyright are made by Congress in the first place, that's where they come from. Of course Congress has the power to take away copyright too, so there's nothing odd about the fact that an act of Congress (the same entity that created the right) can void a copyright. (OK, ok, some of copyright law, at least originally, is common law, but Congress always has the power to override that too).
- gowld 6y ago
  That's not quite true. Copyright is in the Constitution, controlled by the States.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    Copyright law is definitely definitely federal. There are no state-by-state differences to copyright in the USA, it is exclusively federal. You are right the constitution gives the federal government (not the states) the authority to create it. Article 1 Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power… To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
ipaddr 6y ago
In this case only the lyrics would be open not the song itself. That sounds fair.
blendergeek 6y ago
And what if the copyright holder lobbied for the inclusion by reference of the copyrighted work into the law? Does this change the calculus at all?
franga2000 6y ago
Maybe not a Ctrl+F interpretation of "mentioned in a law", but yes, definitely - if something is required by legislation, all copyright, patents, etc. should be void. If the government requires product category X to be developed to the spec of standard Y and standard Y is a closed standard, that law should either be invalidated or the standard should be opened. If a hypothetical government required all citizens to read a specific book, that book better be royalty-free to distribute.
rrobukef 6y ago
For Belgium (maybe even Europe), yes, the Belgian government can and has decided to void international copyright law in specific instances. Source: https://thebelgianscientist.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/belgian-copyright-law-amended-in-favor-of-open-access-to-scientific-articles/ https://thebelgianscientist.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/belgian... In short: For a scientific article and after a waiting period of 6 to 12 months, copyright is voided and the article can be published in open access REGARDLESS of previous copyright agreements.