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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 i
by 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 agoThe 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.
- masklinn 6y ago> The requestor should not bear the burden for scanning in the documents. There’s no mention of scanning here, only copying. Furthermore even if they did scan it and kept the digital data around, if they only did it because of the request and would not otherwise that’s still a cost of fulfilling the request. > The state needs a digital copy no matter what. That obviously is not the case since they do not have one.
- renewiltord 6y agoWhat do they use to control it? The state of California is not permitted to hold copyright (in general).
- schoen 6y agoI think you're thinking of the Federal government -- states are treated differently under the U.S. copyright system and often do hold copyright in their original works. (The Regents of the University of California will be a familiar copyright holder for many people here...)
- renewiltord 6y agoHuh, I must be misremembering then. I thought it was CA too. Ah well, so much for that then.
- pas 6y agoAt 29000 pages it means determining compliance is a profession anyway. (It should be an interactive system availabe to anyone.)
- nraynaud 6y agoYeah, I am a bit baffled by the size, how complex is fire fighting really? And should all the complexity reside in a single document? Like do the home smoke alarm stuff and airplane ballet stuff belong to the same document? (Just guessing at content here)
- freeone3000 6y agoAll of US federal regulations are "one document" (the CFR). To navigate a body of law, you use the table of context or index to find the section you need, and follow the cross-references if necessary, like any reference text.
- cma 6y agoCase law is often as important as written law, and is often heavily paywalled.
- young_unixer 6y agoI 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 agoEither way is fine in my book. But obeying the law should not incur costs to actually know what the law is.
- elihu 6y agoIt 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 agoThe 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 agoMeh, neither airline policy nor executive policy is law, even if the CSR at the check-in desk confuses policy with law.
- gumby 6y agoThe 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 agoMaybe it should simply be affordably accessible. Nothing in life is really free.
- zie 6y agoBuilding codes seems to be one such example where this is pretty uniformly NOT true... sadly.
- MAGZine 6y agomy 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 agoYou'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.