Open Source Effort To Codify America's "Operating System" Online 98
Rubinstien writes "O'Reilly Radar is reporting on an effort to produce Law.gov, 'America's Operating System, Open Source.' The group Public.Resource.Org seeks to 'create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.gov. [They] envision Law.gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.' According to its new website, 'Law.gov would be similar to Data.gov, providing bulk data and feeds to commercial, non-commercial, and governmental organizations wishing to build web sites, operate legal information services, or otherwise use the raw materials of our democracy.'"
spectacular idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Spectacular idea - maybe, just maybe, if we remember what could be happening, and what shouldn't be happening, things will shape up a bit. Both sides seem hell bent on tearing up everything.
I perused the top level sales pitch docs - can't find any good details on how they'd want to organize it. subdomains for each state? subdomains for each type of law? A giant wikipedia? If info can't be easily found on the site through intuitive methods, it's a "failure" from the start (assuming the intent is availability of the data...).
Anyone have any info on such (ie, how it is going to be organized)?
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the title (Score:4, Insightful)
What does open access to laws have to do with operating systems or open source? Sounds like an attempt to ride the Linux hype wave, and it seems to be succeeding so far.
West and Lexis/Nexis are going to love this. (Score:4, Insightful)
For eons, West and Lexis have been making staggering sums reselling primary legal material to all and sundry. Best of luck to this project in prying that material out of their hands, and in surviving the massive lobbying and astroturfing that will ensue before the project achieves that goal.
Re:bad phrasing (Score:2, Insightful)
You do realize that capitalism is entirely voluntary, right?
Not if large capitalists form a cartel on an essential good or service.
Re:bad phrasing (Score:5, Insightful)
The only pure capitalism I see is at local self-organized farmers' markets. Ironically, largely patronized by people who vehemently criticize capitalism.
Just about everything else is taxed and regulated, which perturbs real market function.
Re:first post (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:spectacular idea (Score:4, Insightful)
A giant wikipedia?
God help us if anyone can put what they think the law is. I can only imagine all the urban legend laws that would get put onto the site.
Is this where we can read the health care bill? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this part of Obama's promise to open source the government by letting us read bills before they are voted on? Will congress actually get a chance to read them here?
Re:Bills are patches (Score:4, Insightful)
I have worked on systems in the past (for West specifically) that perform automated primary law patching.
The key thing is to understand the standard language and breakdown of the code. In some jurisdiction, it's by section, others it is by subsection, others, paragraph, and others sentence or sentence fragment.
The laws themselves need to be organized in a fashion they can be searched, patched, and retrieved (verified) based on offical versions.
One thing people have ignored is that generally speaking is there are two types of legal codes. Codified sections and Articles/Laws/Uncodified. The Codified sections are of the type mentioned above.. Title 17, section 237, subsection (a) is amended to read... vs Articles -- Act 236 of the 85th congress is amended as follows.. This is MUCH harder to patch.. because in essence you are patching a patch. (Note, most Tax and Social Security related rules are non-codified. This is because the only way to change from non-codified to codified is to repeal and then re-enact the legislation with an official title. And absolutely no congressman wants to be know as someone who voted to repeal social security, or know as someone who voted in all of these taxes...)
Re:Code by Lawrence Lessig (Score:4, Insightful)
"Law like a free software project" would at least require a patch to the patent code to make it more efficient at rejecting obvious inventions.
The Supreme Court submitted the KSR patch to the case law branch back in 2007 which helped tremendously with this bug.
Most of the problem now seems to be that since patent claims resemble Perl scripts, most users end up reading the comments at the top of the file rather than the claim code because it's easier to understand. Then they start submitting bug reports based on the comments without even finding out whether the new code conflicts with other modules that are already loaded.
FIRST PATCH (Score:1, Insightful)