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Accused of 'Terrorism' For Putting Legal Materials Online (nytimes.com) 191

Posted by msmash from the fighting-the-good-fight dept.
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. From a report: 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.
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Accused of 'Terrorism' For Putting Legal Materials Online More

Accused of 'Terrorism' For Putting Legal Materials Online

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  • Does that mean if I pay the publisher of the laws (who holds the copyright) to add to the EULA a clause saying the laws cannot be used to prosecute me, I can do whatever I want in Georgia. Subject to federal law at least?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      Does that mean if I pay the publisher of the laws (who holds the copyright) to add to the EULA a clause saying the laws cannot be used to prosecute me, I can do whatever I want in Georgia. Subject to federal law at least?

      Your question makes perfect sense in the Robocop universe, but not here...

      (1) The state of Georgia holds copyright, but is subject to an agreement with the publisher about revenue from the publisher's annotations. The state of Georgia is the one who makes the agreement with the publisher.

      (2) Even if such an EULA did exist, it would have zero bearing. Suppose you did something illegal. You'd have broken the Georgia law as written. The fact that someone's interpretations of case law are protected by copyright

      • A key point you implied, but didn't state:

        The summary says they copied "the law and other materials".
        It's the "other materials" they got into copyright trouble over, not the law. They can copy and publisher the law all they want. What they can't legally do at this point is copy and distribute someone's copyright protected *commentary* discussing opinions of the law.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The lower court, however, concluded that "the annotations in the OCGA are sufficiently law-like so as to be properly regarded as a sovereign work. Like the statutory text itself, the annotations are created by the duly constituted legislative authority of the State of Georgia. Moreover, the annotations clearly have authoritative weight in explicating and establishing the meaning and effect of Georgia’s laws. Furthermore, the procedures by which the annotations were incorporated bear the hallmarks of l

  • Silly People (Score:5, Informative)

    by SirAstral ( 1349985 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @02:38PM (#58585774)

    Don't you know that you are legally required to know the law, whether you are allowed to read it or not, even if the officer arresting you for breaking a non-existent one is not required to?

    https://www.mintpressnews.com/... [mintpressnews.com]

    • The Supreme Court should be ignored by most people.

    • Re: Silly People (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      So, for civilians "ignorance is no excuse".
      For police "ignorance is expected".

      This means they'll try their damned best to make sure police are utterly and completely ignorant of the law. They won't teach it. In fact you can tell them there's no such thing as "law". It's "reasonable" to assume an officer didn't understand a law if they were willfully ignorant of it. A nice side-effect being that your rights are enshrined in law so you have no rights per the police. True carte blanche for the PD. How handy.

    • Don't you know that you are legally required to know the law, whether you are allowed to read it or not, even if the officer arresting you for breaking a non-existent one is not required to?

      A fun supreme court decision would be: "Sure you can copyright it. But if you do you can't enforce it."

      Think of the consternation THAT would cause. B-)

      ====

      (I wonder if this is fallout from the case where they guy got around the copyright on the model electrical code by publishing the verbatim version enacted into {unc

  • The law isn't limited to the law (Score:5, Informative)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @02:40PM (#58585782) Homepage Journal

    Laws exist and are written down. But they sometimes point to copyright material as being normative for the regulations.

    A recent example is the revision of FIPS 140-2 into FIPS 140-3.

    FIPS 140-3 contains very little material, FIPS 140-2 has lots. This is because 140-3 just points to ISO/IEC-19790:2012, which contains the new material.

    ISO/IEC:19790-2012 is copyrighted by ISO and costs 178 Swiss francs ( https://www.iso.org/standard/5... [iso.org] ).

    So regulations that hold the force of law, are copyrighted and you have to pay 178 Swiss francs for your own copy. If you add up the cost of the references, it's over $4000. The recent change to 140-3 has increased the quantity of such regulations by a few hundred pages.

    • FIPS 140-3 was abandoned in 2014, are you aware of any attempts to resurrect it?

      • >FIPS 140-3 was abandoned in 2014, are you aware of any attempts to resurrect it?

        It's a standard now.
        The effort was moved to ISO. The changes went into ISO. The new spec was to be a pointer to ISO 19790:2012.

        We waited 5 years for that to happen. It happened two weeks ago.

        https://csrc.nist.gov/News/201... [nist.gov]

    • "Laws exist and are written down. But they sometimes point to copyright material as being normative for the regulations."

      Yea, this is just a sad indictment of representative not representing their people. Well, they do keep voting for them without even asking for a change much, so yea... its more important to them that their taxes are sorted than innocent people going to jail over it.

    • Re:The law isn't limited to the law (Score:5, Informative)

      by spth ( 5126797 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @02:51PM (#58585866)

      In Germany, once that would have resulted in the copyrighted standard becoming public domain. In Germany Laws are free, and it wasn't possible to circumvent that by just having the law require citizens to abide to some other, copyrighted document.

      This was changed in 2003 by introducing 5 Abs. 3 UrhG. Now our laws aren't free anymore, either

    • Interesting problem. From an engineering perspective, it is very reasonable for the building code law to simply say "You must comply with national building code B and national fire code F" rather than duplicating documents B and F. But it is NOT reasonable for linked specifications to be at different access levels.
  • Did he post the law itself? Or did he make a copy of a copyrighted 54 volume set? I suspect he didn't re-enter the 54 volume set himself in order to make a "free" version.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by epine ( 68316 )

      Did he post the law itself? Or did he make a copy of a copyrighted 54 volume set? I suspect he didn't re-enter the 54 volume set himself in order to make a "free" version.

      Your use of the word "free" with scare quotes is clearly a "strategy of terrorism".

      Providing public access to the state's laws and related legal materials, Georgia's lawyers said, was part of a "strategy of terrorism."

      "Terrorism" in the state of Georgia is leaving a doily out of place in the front foyer. Slaves have been whipped for less.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      According to TFA, he posted the laws and the annotations that Georgia commissioned LexisNexis to create. If you want to understand the law, you have to read the annotations. They carry legal-like weight. Georgia gets a percentage of the money LexisNexis makes when they sell access to the annotations. They farm out writing the laws so they can "save the taxpayer the burden of paying for the annotations". It also makes it so you have to be in a lawyer club to be able to read the law, which is BS.

  • Your country makes me laugh... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    .... your representatives don't give a shit about you. Everything is up for sale to the highest bidder. Big pharma, telecoms, music, movie, food industries control the government at state and national level. Unbelievable.

    You are #1 lol

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by RAHH ( 5900166 )
      You're missing the bigger picture where the top 1% own your country, my country, the world, and we're all under the same umbrella. Laughing at what your truly don't understand makes me laugh.

    • You make one of the best cases for Libertarian system of laws, where the system is designed to be minimalist. But then again, you have people wanting to tell others how to live, and that really messes up things for everyone.

      • All Laws are limits on personal freedom so if you're in favor of any then you're in favor of "oppression". Furthermore, the whole libertarian ideology is just like any other system of political beliefs in telling people how to live. Want to solve a collective problem with government? No, that's ruining freedom!

        Clearly, the majority of Americans like having strong rule of law. That's how we got to the here and now. And sure, Democratic governance can be corrupted by wealth but at least it's still beholden to

  • Terrorism angle is BS, but (C) may have some merit (Score:5, Informative)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @02:51PM (#58585862) Homepage Journal

    I think there was a case a decade or two ago that said the actual laws passed by lawmakers - be they cities, states, or otherwise - could not be copyrighted.

    That doesn't mean some of the other things found in those books can't be copyrighted. Obviously, if the book included analysis and commentary suggesting such-and-so law would likely survive or fall to a court challenge, that would probably be copyrightable.

    The difficult part is when the government all but requires you to cite or use books such as these, effectively forcing people to buy them. Any situation like this is contrary to the ideals of a democratic society. Whether it should be considered illegal or not will largely turn on how difficult it is to conduct business with the government without citing or referring to these books. If, say, a court says "you must cite this book" that's clearly requiring its use. If the court says "you must cite this book or an equivalent" and there are a myriad of "equivalent" books and some of them don't cost anything, that's probably okay, but if there are say only 2 or 3 "equivalent books" and they are all 10 times as expensive to use than the book in question, then you have an "all but required" situation which is un-democratic.

    TFA comes right out and says what the issue is in this case:

    In the Georgia case, the question is whether annotations commissioned and approved by the state may be copyrighted.

    It also says why these annotations create an "all but required" scenario:

    The annotations include descriptions of judicial decisions interpreting the statutes. Only a very bad lawyer would fail to consult them in determining the meaning of a statute.

    One solution for situations like this may be for a civic-minded patron to bankroll re-doing the work that created the annotations and donating the work product to the public domain. This may deter other states from doing what Georgia did. Not an ideal solution - the ideal solution would have been for the Georgia Legislature to ask the taxpayers to foot the bill and have the original work product put explicitly in the public domain.

    • Terrorism angle is there for fear (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @03:21PM (#58586082)
      there are several harsh anti-terrorism laws on the books. This is Georgia's way of threatening him with those laws.
      • that while it's baseless you never really know for sure what a jury's going to do, especially after decades of "Tough on Crime" scare tactics. It gives prosecutors a lot of leverage.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by dbett_slightreprise ( 5975582 )
        Read the article. The guy is the one who characterized his own theft of copyrighted material as "terrorism". He admits to violating copyrights because he thinks certain material (despite being created at someone else's expense) should be freely available. The State simply quoted his own words in describing his efforts. They have not threatened to charge him with anything even remotely terrorism related.

        • Maybe you ought to reread the article:

          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.”

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jrumney ( 197329 )
        This probably merits a countersuit charging the state with terrorism for their misuse of terrorism laws to terrorize the plaintiff into dropping their suit.

  • Do people here read? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sunking2 ( 521698 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @03:01PM (#58585940)

    This isn't about publishing the laws. It's about publishing an Annotated version of the laws. The state hired an outside firm to go through and put their opinions/justifications down for laws. Part of the deal was they would pay less or take a cut for the service if it could be sold. The laws themselves are public domain. But if you want a published outside opinion/commentary on them you perhaps have to pay the copyright holder. I say perhaps because it stills seems to have to be decided. I give no opinion, just saying what the actual story is about.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nitehawk214 ( 222219 )

      The plebs are allowed to know the laws, but are not allowed to know the interpretation of the laws. Good loophole so they can keep charting people under laws that need a legal expert to understand.

      • Should lawyers provide free interpretation of any law?

        • Re:Do people here read? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by pslytely psycho ( 1699190 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @12:34AM (#58588130) Journal
          No, but the state should. The law was created within the states legal structure, paid for by the citizenry. Therefore access to the law and all underlying information, annotations and interpretations should be made available at no charge to said taxpayer. After all, they already paid for it in the salaries and perks of the state representatives.

          If I am subject to the law, and ignorance of it is not an excuse, then I should have the unfettered right to all information regarding that law without financial burden. If the law requires copyrighted material to understand, then either the copyright should be invalidated or the law should.

          • It's not so much about who paid for the documents or why. The real reason both a lower and appeals court has decided (unanimously, in the appeals court case) that these are not copyrightable is because the annotations are actually cited by judges in determining cases. These annotations have the weight of law, and you cannot know the law if you don't know the annotations as well. They are sufficiently "lawlike" to fall under the federal copyright exemption for government edicts.

    • Then why is the State suing (Score:5, Informative)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @03:26PM (#58586108)
      and not the law firm that supposedly owns the copyrights? If the State didn't buy the copyright then aren't they without standing in the case?

      And speaking of not reading:

      “When you go to a statute, you see the language of the statute, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you the meaning,” she said. “You go to the annotations, which leads you to the court decisions, where the judges actually tell you what the words mean.”

      In ruling for Mr. Malamud, the appeals court made a similar point.

      “The annotations clearly have authoritative weight in explicating and establishing the meaning and effect of Georgia’s laws,” Judge Stanley Marcus wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta. “Georgia’s courts have cited to the annotations as authoritative sources on statutory meaning and legislative intent.”

      Emphasis added by me, but I think you get the point. The annotations have the practical effect of amending the law. The Georgia and the other states know this and they are actively using copyright to hide portions of the law.

      • âoeThe annotations clearly have authoritative weight in explicating and establishing the meaning and effect of Georgiaâ(TM)s laws,â Judge Stanley Marcus wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta. âoeGeorgiaâ(TM)s courts have cited to the annotations as authoritative sources on statutory meaning and legislative intent.â

        Emphasis added by me, but I think you get the point. The annotations have the practical effect of amending the law. The Georgia and the other states know this and they are actively using copyright to hide portions of the law.

        I think you are misunderstanding Judge Marcus's comments.

        I read Judge Marcus to mean that the annotations are authoritative, but the implication is they are authoritative because they accurately summarize the truly authoritative sources: The laws and the judicial opinions that ruled on these laws, not because they are somehow "magically self-authoritative."

        In other words, if a controlling judicial opinion took 500 words of legalese to say X and the annotation took 100 words of mostly-plain-english with jus

        • You don't understand how American law works (Score:4, Insightful)

          by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @04:07PM (#58586380)
          precedent (e.g. how a previous judge rules) can radically change how a law works. This isn't about presenting a case differently, it would be more about not realizing a case could and should be presented in the first place.

          The example given is sodomy laws. It's still illegal in Georgia but the law was declared unconstitutional when applied to consenting adults. That's a pretty obvious example (which is why the article used it) but there's tons of grey area in law and no shortage of "activist" judges or laws written intentionally vague.

          Hell, right now every State in the South is putting obviously unconstitutional abortion laws on the books in the hopes of getting before the SCOTUS and overturning Roe v. Wade. Don't underestimate the power of those annotations. They have legal force. They shape laws. And for a badly written law they _are_ the law.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by fgouget ( 925644 )

            The example given is sodomy laws. It's still illegal in Georgia but the law was declared unconstitutional when applied to consenting adults.

            That's really awful. What the heck is this law still doing on the books if it's unconstitutional?

            Also, from the article: “When you go to a statute, you see the language of the statute, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you the meaning,” she said. “You go to the annotations, which leads you to the court decisions, where the judges actually tell you what the words mean.”

            That's horrifying too. Is the law a sacred text that only the high priests can interpret? Did the legislator

            • and yes, it's an absolute cluster fuck. It's why Trump's victory and his 2 SCOTUS nominees means that if he wins a second term (and therefor gets to replace Ruth Ginsberg) it means Roe v Wade _will_ be overturned.

              Our entire legal system puts a huge amount of power in the hands of judges. In theory it's checks and balances but in practice it's meant to slow change and make our laws less progressive. Works too.

            • This is how common law works, which is what most western countries follow (with the exception of a few places like Scottland and I think France and Italy, which follow Roman law). And really, it sounds a lot worse than it is. There are built in checks and balances that keep things pretty fair.

              Basically what happens is a group of representatives of the people (local, state, federal, whatever) writes a law. They have an intention behind the law when they write it, but they might not necessarily know the exact

      • The state DID buy the copyright. That's why the state is suing - it owns the copyright on the documents. It's more than likely in their contract with the publisher (who was given exclusive rights to publish at their own discretion in return for the copyright and a small royalty fee to the state) that the state must sue if there is a copyright issue.

        States can own copyright, unlike the US Government. However, all edicts issued by any government is public domain. So the question is whether the annotations the

    • Seems pretty simple to me. The state shouldn't use tax payer money to create copyrighted material relating to law. If that means a higher up-front cost, then so be it.
    • If the state paid for those annotations, then by extension they should also be public property.

    • Re:Do people here read? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by richardtallent ( 309050 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @08:02PM (#58587398) Homepage

      Many times, "annotations" merely mean footnotes, links to related court cases, etc. They are theoretically copyrightable, assuming they meet the standard. This, in and of itself, is not a problem for publishers like PublicResource.

      However, in the case of the CGA, part of the issue is that the "annotations" also include the *titles of the sections*. A set of laws without headings at major junction points of the law is basically useless for navigation. FindLaw (owned by Thomson Reuters), for example, also publishes the Code of Georgia, but in unannotated form, so once you get below a "Chapter" in the regulation, you're essentially just looking at a table of contents of numbers. This is the *only* state in the US that includes section titles in the "annotated" content.

      Also, the *unannotated* code is not available from the State of Georgia, and the "official" code linked from the State is the *annotated* code, which is hosted by LexisNexis and hidden behind their spider-hostile web site. (California, New York, and Tennessee also have their official publications of laws outsourced to LN or WestLaw.)

      Part of my job is maintaining a company-wide system that consumes and analyzes statutes and regulations from hundreds of jurisdictions (from countries down to villages). We look for changes, assign metadata, and use the database to do work for our clients (we don't compete with the "official" publishers). Sites like LexisNexis and WestLaw are purposefully designed to make my job difficult, because they are trying their best to monopolize and monetize publication of public domain laws. They use these annotation copyright claims, along with anti-spider technology and ludicrous TOS, to create virtual fences against anyone else publishing the same laws, annotated or not.

  • Annotated is the key bit (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dbett_slightreprise ( 5975582 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @03:04PM (#58585972)
    Putting aside the silly "terrorism" assertion, the claim here is really about the "annotation" portion. The actual statutes passed by the legislature make up only a portion of the Annotated Codes. The remaining portions which can include cross references, case law citations, regulations, etc. require significant time and expense for legal publishers. Allowing someone to simply reproduce that work and distribute it for free would obviously mean publishers would have no incentive to create the annotated versions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

      The question is really whether the annotations offer a significant (i.e. making a difference for judges) insight into the interpretation of the laws, in which case such insight should by all means be public knowledge. It's a different matter if the annotations are just cross references or so. I'm assuming the latter is true or it would have been part of the laws itself already.

      • The Annotations do provide valuable insight into the laws. That is why they are valuable to people trying to interpret the law, and why legal publishers pay people to create the annotations. Why should someone be able to steal that work - especially given that if we permit it no publisher would incur the expense of creating annotations in the first place. That is the whole point of having copyright protections in the first place.

        • TFA makes it clear that The State of Georgia holds copyright on the annotations.

        • >Why should someone be able to steal that work

          Because context always matters and in this case, the annotations are the context in which the laws get interpreted and applied to us.

  • Not really accused of terrorism (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Had a hard time believing Georgia's lawyer would make terrorism argument. From the Court Filing:

    Defendant’s founder and president, Carl Malamud, has indicated that this type of strategy has been a successful form of “terrorism” that he has employed in the past to force government entities to publish documents on Malamud’s terms. See Exhibit 2.

    -12-
    20. Consistent with its strategy of terrorism, Defendant freely admits

    Based on quotations used, it seems like Carl Malamud used the term himself to describe his tactics.

  • Georgia's lawyers are going to have to explain what they mean by that. I suspect, though, that they think they're clever and that tossing the word "terrorism" around will give them points in their favor when they appear before a judge. I cannot see how posting the State's laws with annotations is in any way a terrorist act but then I'm not batcrap crazy. Georgia's politicians might just be so afraid of their citizens that they actually believe that making the State's laws understandable to the public is a b

  • Summary is a rather biased take (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @03:17PM (#58586056)
    Can't read TFA because it's behind the NY Times' paywall. But "terrorism" seems to be the new Godwin's law [wikipedia.org]. Meaning in order to get a clearer understanding of the case, you have to take a step back and look at references to this case before the T word started being thrown around.

    Despite how the summary makes it sound, the issue isn't copyright of the law. Courts have already found that you can't copyright the law [wikipedia.org]. What's at issue is copyright of annotations to the law [lowelaw.com]. That is, the references to court decisions and cases relevant to each particular section of law. The states are arguing that someone has to put in the time and money to find all those annotations. And if they cannot make money for doing so via copyright, they will not do it. And everyone will be worse off because they'll be referencing laws without knowing if court decisions have clarified or altered the interpretation of said law.

    IMHO the simplest solution would seem to be for the states to hire a company to do the annotations for a fee, rather than for copyright ownership. That is, instead of hiring a company to do the annotations, the states "do the annotations" but subcontract the work to a company who does it as a work for hire [wikipedia.org]. That sidesteps the legal issue while making everyone happy (well, maybe not the company if it was looking forward to 130 years of royalties, and the government if it was hoping to get this work done without having to budget for it). As for this particular case, I can see it going either way. A decision against the states could potentially strip IP protection away from anything done for the government by a private company or individual.

    Worst outcome would be if the states stop having the annotations done. Then you end up in a similar situation as with sales taxes in the U.S. There are over 10,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the U.S. that an online store has to track. Obviously it's impossible for all but the biggest stores to track that many jurisdictions to see if a new sales tax was passed that day. The best solution would be for there to be a single government database listing all the sales tax rates. The government jurisdiction updates their sales tax every time they make a change, every business downloads a copy of that master sales tax database at the start of the day. But the government doesn't do this, so you have to buy the database from a private company which tracks the sales tax rates. The problem being these companies do not indemnify you if they make an error. If you charged too little sales tax because this company made a mistake, the shortfall comes out of your pocket. That wouldn't happen with a master government database. Likewise, a master government annotation list would be ideal, as updates would be available to everyone simultaneously, and errors in the annotations would be the fault of the government (who made the annotations), not the private individual or company who followed the erroneous annotation.
    • SpaceX got money from Nasa while developing it's boosters. Does that mean all the engineering work and software is now public domain?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rnturn ( 11092 )

        "The state says this is a sensible cost-saving measure, 'minimizing burdens on taxpayers' by sparing them from paying for the preparation of annotations."

        Or -- and I'm just spitballin' here -- the State could write easily understood and unambigious laws in the first freakin' case!

        • That doesn't help. "Shall not" is as clear as it gets and courts say it means "shall not except every exception we care to fabricate out of whole clothe". If the law itself can't tell a person what conduct is actually prohibited, free access to whatever does is required when it's clearly official and authoritative.

    • Re:Summary is a rather biased take (Score:4, Informative)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @04:42PM (#58586596)

      But "terrorism" seems to be the new Godwin's law [wikipedia.org]. Meaning in order to get a clearer understanding of the case, you have to take a step back and look at references to this case before the T word started being thrown around.

      Here is the reference: https://law.resource.org/pub/u... [resource.org]

      Just to be clear, the defendant himself described his own work as "standards terrorism". When Georgia's lawyers made their filing, they said that the defendant self-described his work as "terrorism" (and they used quotes).

      IMHO the simplest solution would seem to be for the states to hire a company to do the annotations for a fee, rather than for copyright ownership. That is, instead of hiring a company to do the annotations, the states "do the annotations" but subcontract the work to a company who does it as a work for hire [wikipedia.org]. That sidesteps the legal issue while making everyone happy (well, maybe not the company if it was looking forward to 130 years of royalties, and the government if it was hoping to get this work done without having to budget for it).

      That's precisely what happened. In this particular case (according to TFA), "Georgia holds the copyright to the annotations, but the company has the right to sell them while paying the state a royalty."

      And it was indeed done because Georgia wanted to get this done without having to budget for it. From TFA: "The state says this is a sensible cost-saving measure, “minimizing burdens on taxpayers” by sparing them from paying for the preparation of annotations."

      In my mind, if Georgia paid up front for the annotations, then the burden of creating those annotations would be evenly spread amongst all taxpayers in Georgia. The royalty agreement is a way instead to spread the burden amongst the law firms who fight cases based on it, plus the interested citizens, plus a bit of padding for the publishing firm. I can't say a priori which is the most just way to distribute the burden. My instinct is that it should be borne by all taxpayers - but only if the taxpayers don't vote in someone who will reduce their tax burden by cutting what they think of as esoteric legal stuff.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      The problem is not that any law student can write their own legal analysis and it'd be copyrighted. The problem is when you have a set of annotations that is the official interpretation. Like imagine that with the constitution there was an annotated version that in detailed specified what "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" means like who, where, when, how, what falls under the definition of militia, arms and so on. And if you tried to argue the law any other way they'd po

    • but it's not about Godwin's law. There's a ton of nasty post 9/11 laws that mention "terrorism".

      The prosecutors are using these laws to increase the threat of penalties and jail time in the hope of making the defendant plead guilty to a lesser charge because after decades of "tough on crime" culture and media there's no telling what a jury might convict you of, especially if you're in Georgia and not of the right "persuasion"...

    • IMHO the simplest solution would seem to be for the states to hire a company to do the annotations for a fee, rather than for copyright ownership.

      Yep, you are correct. Don't you think they know that too? This is by design. That's what everyone is complaining about. It's another attack on FOIA.

  • Wasn't "accused of terrorism". Inflammatory bait. (Score:5, Informative)

    by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @03:20PM (#58586074)

    There was no accusation of terrorism. This is inflammatory click-bait.

    https://law.resource.org/pub/u... [resource.org]
    Defendant’s founder and president, Carl Malamud, has indicated that this type of strategy has been a successful form of “terrorism” that he has employed in the past to force government entities to publish documents on Malamud’s terms. See Exhibit 2.

    In other words it was Malamud himself who characterized his actions as terrorism. The Georgia lawyers are clearly putting the word in quotes to distance themselves from the accusation.

    The next paragraph of the Georgia filing goes on: "Consistent with its strategy of terrorism, Defendant freely admits to the copying and distribution of massive numbers of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Annotations on at least its https://yeswescan.org/ [yeswescan.org] website." They don't use the quotes this time. I figure it's clear from the context that they're still referring to Malamud's own self-description, and I figure the court and all parties understand that. But whatever you claim about that, their accusation nevertheless is literally not an accusation of terrorism, but an accusation of copyright infringement.

  • Ongoing (Score:3)

    by drafalski ( 232178 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @03:20PM (#58586080)

    Other Slashdot articles that should be included in the "related" links:
    California in 2008: https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
    Malamud and his Public.Resource.Org in 2012: https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
    Original story about Georgia in 2015: https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]

  • Without an exclusive monopoly, lawmakers will have no financial incentive to rule over you. Without profit as an incentive, why should they even bother? You terrorists are going to make it so that all the rulers go move to some other country and tell them what to do or not do, leaving you alone and free.

  • From TFS:

    But people who want to see other materials in the books, the state says, must pay the publisher.

    Follow the money.

  • Seriously, this is just more extremism, and it is killing America.

  • Meh (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I was accused of domestic violence without ever having threatened anyone with violence or done anything violent... so, you know, it's whatever. You'd think it would require a criminal investigation or evidence or something - nope. I've got no criminal record, police were never called to my home, my wife and children never had any bruises or anything because I never fucking hit them, none of my belongings are broken because I don't get angry and throw things, there are no holes in the walls despite allegat

  • If I don't have access to the laws then I don't have to follow them. Period.

    • If I don't have access to the laws then I don't have to follow them. Period.

      What you don't have free access to are the annotations, even though the state paid to have the annotations recorded and holds the copyright. So when you want to know if an action is legal in Georgia, be able to cite the base law and supply your own interpretation.

  • What a travesty of democracy (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is just stupid and greedy (which are the most Germany, Britishy and Americany things) public records are public records and if a public office uses terms like "brand" or "copyright infrigement of public records" they are talking about a private company not a public government agency.

  • One of the good things about the US is the idea that there is no crown copyright. Here in Oz you pay to read the laws.

    If the copyright is supposed to pay for the parliament that makes the laws, then it is a huge loss making business.

    • The Swedish do it better. Their constitution says that all government documents must be accessible to the public. The result is that all court documents are public, with exceptions being short-term rather than perpetual. It makes trade secret litigation much more awkward.

  • The original story was covered last year [youtube.com] by Leonard French of Lawful Masses.

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