▲ 167 points
back
85 comments
> [the judge] made the extraordinary finding that Public.Resource.Org is engaged in "commercial" copying despite being a nonprofit, stating that the organization "profits" by "the attention, recognition, and contributions it receives in association with its copying and distributing the copyrighted OCGA annotations, and its use was neither nonprofit nor educational."
I know legal definitions might not always mesh with lay definitions, but is this a standard interpretation of "commercial?" It makes sense if you factor in that the grants public.resource.org receives (a few 100k a year) are directly related to their presentation of information, but the quoted passage seems a bit all-encompassing.
I would also be interested to see how this is being interpreted as not "educational".
I feel like the challenging and political nature of Mr. Malamud's communications were a big misstep. Putting government representatives on the defensive turns an already difficult bureaucracy into a brick wall.
On the other hand, there's an opportunity for a sufficiently funded non-profit to cross reference official code books with judicial public records to auto-annotate the law with pertinent cases where it was used. What would be missing would be human-added value like brief descriptions of the outcome and how it is likely to apply to other legal cases.
On the other hand, if there's no way to machine-read the law, we have a questionable impasse.
This struck me as the most outrageous aspect of the story.
I think having a 3rd party host laws behind a paywall is a terrible idea in terms of the public good, but I can at least see that the cost based argument behind it is coherent.
But the judge finding Malmud to be engaged in "commercial" activity and "profiting" without profiting is some Orwellian bs and seems to me to be belie a personal stake in this decision. After all, judges in Georgia have no incentive to see defense lawyers get better/freer access to the annotated case law (and the state prosecutors surely get it for free anyway). I hope Malmud succeeds in appealing.
Can you spell out why judges don't have an incentive for defense lawyers to have better access to the law? When I was clerking for a judge, my main complaint was that the legal briefs were not well written or researched and I basically had to do it myself. Informed lawyers make it easier on the judge and his staff.
The text of the Georgia law is not copyrightable, and the article states this. The issue is with the annotations, which are basically links to related resources. These are made at great effort and expense by Lexis/Nexis, a private company. These annotations are copyrightable. The mistake is Georgia making the annotated version of its codes the "official" version.
Except every bill in the legislature is called "An Act to amend the Official Code of Georgia Annotated." It's not a mistake, the official version is the annotated version. There's no daylight between the mythical "unannotated" version and the annotated one.
> It's not a mistake, the official version is the annotated version.
Joshuaheard is saying that making it the official version is a mistake. Not in the sense of "oops, we accidentally wrote down the wrong thing" but in the sense of "this is a bad idea caused by lack of foresight". Just as someone might say it's a mistake to ask a stranger in a bar to watch your bag while you go to the restroom. It's not an accident but it is a mistake.
Very likely, the annotations have no controlling legal effect. The difference between unofficial and official versions of the text largely relies on which version will control the interpretation if there is a copying error (e.g., one says "remuneration" and one says "enumeration"). I suspect Georgia made the annotated code official on the basis that it's the copy that everyone already has.
Stripping out the annotations and publishing that should be completely kosher for copyright and would still give the controlling version of the law (assuming no copying errors were made, of course).
> These are made at great effort and expense by Lexis/Nexis, a private company.
According to the article:
> the annotations, which were copyrighted and owned by the state
If the state published an official version of its code and Lexis/Nexis took that and privately published its own edition with value-add annotations, then I think that argument that the annotated version can be under restrictive copyright would make more sense. However, if the state contracted with Lexis/Nexis and retains copyright on the annotations, Lexis should be getting paid by the state for the work, and the work should be free.
"Mistake."
This is how democracy ends. You can go to jail for committing crimes you didn't know were against the law, but you can't know what the laws are unless you pay nearly a month's wages at minimum wage.
> This is how democracy ends
If we're talking about actual democracy, we might even say it never started.
Secret laws, Secret courts, hush orders...
Hardly the USA described by the Constitution I read.
If America were a democracy, there's a big difference between Republic and Democracy
Look, a correct use of HTTP status code 451: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/ga/georgia.scan.2013/go...
I see 403 in Chrome DevTools, though.
As the saying goes, "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Seems like you could argue that's incredibly unfair (classist, maybe?) in this case.
Then again, you could probably make a good argument that it's unfair even if all the laws are freely available.
And here I am, again and again being reminded how the US can be so backwards in some issues here and there.
Not making THEIR OWN LAWS in its entirety available for free for every citizen? What the hell is this?
It's important to note that Georgia is one state out of fifty; most states don't do this and many have the entire body of their laws available online from the official source, not a third-party provider (And federal law certainly is as well.)
What is fair to say is that the patchwork nature of America's state/federal system divide makes these kinds of gross inconsistencies happen more often than they maybe should, and it'd be fair to criticize Georgia in particular for letting/encouraging this to happen. But it's not a fair critique of the whole country, and you shouldn't add it to your mental reference of "ways the US is effed up" except to the extent that "some states do bad stuff" is already on there.
Also, the authorized publisher, LexisNexis, makes the entire code available online for free here.[1]
As far as I can tell this is the result of an interaction between laws, and not the result of the law itself.
It's not as if "laws being copyright-punishable" was an intended design decision when they were written up, so it seems disingenuous to phrase it as if this were the case.
One would think that making laws and regulations easily accessible would be a priority for lawmakers. Is this issue exclusive to Georgia, or are there other states or nations with similar restrictions?
One would think wrong. If the populace fully understood the amount of sheer stupidity in the laws and regulations the politicians create there would be problems.
Plus, when the populace is ignorant of how easily they can become criminals in the eyes of the state, the easier they are to control.
> One would think that making laws and regulations easily accessible would be a priority for lawmakers.
Not really. It continues the trend towards making poverty a crime.
Besides all EU legislation being available online I think there is an obligation for member states to publish their legislation for free as well.
I dunno about other states but in my country there is a small federal agency whose only job is to publish legal and civil information, including some very good books about the legal and political system; the state pays for most of it, so they are quite affordable (couple Euros).
This is a problem for many of the municipalities in the United States. I'm not familiar with the history of how this ended up happening for Georgia, but for municipalities the cause is often the economics of codifying and publishing the official code.
Assembling the laws into a usable code is extremely labor intensive. Someone has to figure out where the new law fits into the old code and copy and paste as necessary. Governments often outsource the work to a third party vendor in order to free up internal human and monetary resources. The end effect is that the codifier controls the code.
There are all kinds of downstream effects. For one, computer-readable formats of the law are nonexistent. This also means that there is a huge barrier to creating interesting new technologies on top of the law.
I'm the cofounder at Open Law Library (http://www.openlawlib.org), a non-profit that is trying to fix this problem by introducing technology at all stages of the law making process. We're working with Washington D.C. right now, and you can find a glimpse into the future at https://beta.code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/code/ (bulk downloads available at the link at the bottom).
Oh, I'm sorry, is the poor burden of publishing the laws of a government too hard for the big bad government to possibly do or fund?
Of course the solution is to make it copyrighted / restricted / owned by a third party corporation.
What? Simplify laws or properly fund the ancillary tasks entailed in changing laws? Blasphemy.
This is corruption, nothing else.
How does case law work in the US? Must these annotations be used in interpreting the law, or is it merely an indication of how the law has been interpreted previously? To me, this is the crucial point. If the judge is forced to use the annotations in interpreting the law, then it seems clear that it is part of the law. If it is not, then I can completely understand how it is covered by copyright.
I suppose the other question is if they intend (or are able) to appeal. It sounds like something that could potentially make it up to the supreme court if it is not already clear.
IANAL but it's my understanding that, for low court cases, it's not that a judge is forced to abide by the case law precedents so much as that they're overwhelmingly likely to, so in practice the annotations are probably essential reading for anticipating how a case will play out. And the unannotated law are probably akin to a formal tech spec - not very useful to anyone except the primary implementor, and especially not to laypeople trying to learn the law or self defend.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent#United_States_legal_...
This is damn disgraceful (and that's about as respectable a comment I can make about it). The same atrocious behavior happens in Britain and commonwealth countries with Crown Copyright.
For the life of me, why do we put up with this nonsense? We ought to be rioting in the streets over it until fixed.
(It's little wonder our democracies are in such big trouble when so few of the citizenry actually care about atrocities committed against democracy by 'The State'.)
Can a defense attorney in Georgia argue their client couldn't obey the law because they couldn't afford to know the law?
They can argue all they want, but the client will still lose if that is the only point the defence has.
It's available for free.
Here's the full, freely available state of Georgia code: http://www.legis.ga.gov/en-US/default.aspx.
It seems like some folks may not like that a private company does the hosting or that they have exclusive rights to its reproduction. You could consider some reasons this might be the case that are reasonable, like the cost of maintaining it is actually cheaper by having a company who has the appropriate resources and infrastructure to support it, it's probably a challenge/costly to hire an internal team to maintain it at a high enough quality level, the hosting company made a deal with the government to reduce maintenance and hosting costs by having exclusive hosting/reproduction rights. These are all pretty reasonable things to happen,given that the source text is still freely available to anyone. I think anyone who has an argument against this is probably looking for a reason to get upset at what they perceive to be unfairness by "the other team", and won't be convinced otherwise. Such is life, oh well.
I think it is completely reasonable to take the position that the law should be freely accessible to all, and also the process of providing it should not be in the hands of a private entity, or if it must be, that said entity cannot do things like be the exclusive provider, or charge egregiously for things like copies in a reasonable medium (e. g. paper or CD).
It's not a "team" thing, and I reject wholly the implication that anyone opposed to this is just trying to score political points for their "team." Perhaps people twisting the narrative to "they won't let anyone read the laws!" are indeed politically motivated, but that's not what you or I are discussing here -- and even so, you need to assume good faith if you want a discussion.
While it is reasonable for LexisNexis to be the official provider, it is not reasonable for them to abuse this privilege by charging silly amounts for certain kinds of access, and it is not reasonable for the state to sue to prevent others from distributing copies of what should by all rights be public domain and fully accessible material. Those problems are what's at issue here, not whether or not the state can hire a DB administrator.
The "annotated" version is the official law of Georgia. The freely available code you link to is missing the annotations, despite those being officially adopted as law as well.
Without the annotations, you do not have the full law.
The article says many times that this is not the official code. That means it's useless, what one must follow is the official one, that is annotated by a private party, and paywalled.
"Free" in relation to pricing is very different from "free" in relation to ownership by the commons. The law being the latter is crucial to a well functioning democracy.
Yeah, some days I think the US civil war was a mistake, and the south should have just become a separate country. Sort of a "Mexico North", or something.
With apologies to otherwise intelligent people that have to live in that hell hole...
There is no hell hole in south, please do not dramatize things. Travel to south then go to east and west, you will see that if you are in big cities they are not that different from each other. Rural areas on the other hand are different from the cities.
There is a widespread lack of education across the country mostly in rural areas and in poor urban areas. But it is not only south issue that is an issue all over the country. Combine that with wealth inequality and we get what we have.
You can see the same trends in elections, big cities mostly go blue or even dark blue, even in traditionally conservative states.
The problem isn't exclusive to Georgia (or the South). The State of Oregon also filed suit (later dismissed, IIRC) against Malamud for republishing their laws. And most progressive cities publish their official code through 3rd parties with restrictive copyright attached.
This problem exists for all of America.
Has there been any attempts by anyone to publish these laws via Bittorrent or ipfs?
Not that I am condoning it, but I'm curious if it has been attempted. I searched but did not find anything.
It appears it is not about publishing the "law" but publishing the annotations written about the law that was the issue.
But complicated by the fact that those annotations are considered official parts of the law. If it were standard legal commentary, there'd be no issue. But the state has made those part of the law and (effectively) barred viewing them without paying a steep (for the average person) price. So the only free portion to view is a subset of the current legal code.
Long live the Confederacy! That's all this is, aristocrats who believe in pay to play. There is no right to be part of civilized society, you must be useful, in which case you can pay to play. If you're not useful you can wither and die.
They lost the war, so now it's this neo-feudal free market applied to everything. The democratic free marketers should be bothered by this because they're going to take your system to its natural conclusion: the gangs of New York.
Voting is also becoming pay to play. You must pay $$ for a government issued photo ID that proves you're a citizen if you want to vote. And this can effectively be any amount of money, established by the necessary cost of production, using patented, proprietary technology owned by a corporation.
It's corporatocracy, kakistocracy, plutocracy, aristocracy - all in one.
Not debating that Georgia should make it easier for folks to do what they want with the copy they publish for free but...
What's fair is that LexisNexis be compensated for the value it has added to that Law (e.g., the "annotations"/links). They did the work. It is up to them how to share it. And sharing for free isn't always a viable business.
Note that there is nothing to stop Public.Resource.Org or anyone else from adding their own metadata on top of that Law and publishing it. But if it was done by LexisNexis and licenced by the state of Georgia of course they will come after someone that tries to publish the Law + The Annotations. And they would be right to in a capitalist society (which is where we all live and how we thrive).
If Georgia can still come after someone else for annotating the Law themselves (original work, not a copy of the work LexisNexis did) and sharing it how they want then I would agree there is some kind of problem there. But NOT the problem implied by the article headline (which is a little clickbaity IMHO).
Judge Story "went on to acknowledge the Georgia situation is 'an unusual case because most official codes are not annotated and most annotated codes are not official.' Despite the fact the OCGA is official law, the judge said its annotations are entitled to copyright. The Georgia General Assembly has made clear 'that the OCGA contains both law and commentary,' Story wrote, and the two are distinguishable."
Removing commentary or replacing with original commentary would abridge the official code.
If LexisNexis should be compensated for the value they added, then the state should pay them for that value, just as they pay the legislators to write the law. The resulting code should be freely available to every citizen bound by it.
I agree that the problem as far as I understand it is not really that related to copyright: the law (unannotated) is freely available, as it should be, and of course value-adding annotations by private enterprise can hold enforcable copyright. (The references in other comments below to EU regulations etc. are thus not really applicable, as also in the EU you have freely available laws but privately copyrighted annotations and comments to these laws.)
What I gather from the article, though, and which I do find in a way even stranger than the copyright question, is this: Apparently Georgia has made the annotated version of their law "official"! Can this be right? For me, this sounds far worse than the copyright question - it would mean that you give an official stamp of approval to privately prepared annotations?
The article is not that clear on this question. Wikipedia [1] has some more on it, but not being a lawyer, I also can't answer the question I would have about it, which is this: What's the role of these privately prepared annotations for the judiciary process? Are they treated like law, because they are published together with the law? Or are they treated like any other private comment / annotations out there would? This, for me, seems to be the crucial question. If it is the former, they should be freely available (and, more importantly, not be written by a private company!). If it is the latter, then I think LexisNexis has some point claiming their copyright, no?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Code_of_Georgia_Annot...
> What's fair is that LexisNexis be compensated for the value it has added to that Law.
Nobody has an automatic right to be compensated for doing work.
Any right to compensation arises from people having benefited from that work, and from the receipt of that benefit having been voluntary.
Citizens of Georgia are required to obey the law. Judges use the annotations when deciding whether the law has been obeyed.
So, citizens of Georgia have two choices, risk breaking the law, or pay a third party for permission to know whether or not they are breaking the law.
LexisNexis's compensation is about as legitimate as that of a protection racket.
"Say, that's a nice law you have there. Be a real shame if someone were to... annotate it."