Yes we had to read it twice in the New York Times before we could register that level of stupidity.
We all know the issues and have been dealing with it for years and when the Times writes …
States have struck deals with legal publishers, the article said, that have effectively privatized the law. “Publishers now use powerful legal tools to control who has access to the text of the law, how much they must pay and under what terms,” the article said.
It isn’t hard to guess who we are talking about and if they think the issue is out of hand in the US they should look and see what’s been happening in other jurisdictions around our increasingly sad planet.
Three cheers for Malamud, three cheers for the federal appeals court and three cheers for the Times for finally bringing this issue to the fore.
The last time the Supreme Court addressed the matter, in 1888, it ruled that “the whole work done by the judges constitutes the authentic exposition and interpretation of the law, which, binding every citizen, is free for publication to all.”
This is what the Times is saying
WASHINGTON — Carl Malamud believes in open access to government records, and he has spent more than a decade putting them online. You might think states would welcome the help.
But when Mr. Malamud’s group posted the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, the state sued for copyright infringement. Providing public access to the state’s laws and related legal materials, Georgia’s lawyers said, was part of a “strategy of terrorism.”
A federal appeals court ruled against the state, which has asked the Supreme Court to step in. On Friday, in an unusual move, Mr. Malamud’s group, Public.Resource.Org, also urged the court to hear the dispute, saying that the question of who owns the law is an urgent one, as about 20 other states have claimed that parts of similar annotated codes are copyrighted.
The issue, the group said, is whether citizens can have access to “the raw materials of our democracy.”
The case, Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, No. 18-1150, concerns the 54 volumes of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, which contain state statutes and related materials.
The state, through a legal publisher, makes the statutes themselves available online, and it has said it does not object to Mr. Malamud doing the same thing. But people who want to see other materials in the books, the state says, must pay the publisher.
This is part of a disturbing trend, according to a new law review article, “Who Owns the Law? Why We Must Restore Public Ownership of Legal Publishing,” by Leslie Street, a law professor and librarian at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., and David Hansen, a librarian at Duke. It will be published in The Journal of Intellectual Property Law.
States have struck deals with legal publishers, the article said, that have effectively privatized the law. “Publishers now use powerful legal tools to control who has access to the text of the law, how much they must pay and under what terms,” the article said.
Mr. Malamud said those arrangements have complicated his efforts.
“When I started Public Resource,” he said, “I thought our mission would be a focus on making the laws easier to use and read, but because of a buzz saw of opposition we have spent much of our time fighting back takedown notices and lawsuits.”
Read the full article https://practicesource.com/wp-admin/post-new.php
