Georgia Lawmakers Sue Carl Malamud For Publishing Georgia Law 292
TechDirt reports that the state of Georgia is unhappy enough with Carl Malamud for publishing the state's own laws that it's sued Malamud for doing so. From the article:
The specific issue here is that while the basic Georgia legal code is available to the public, the state charges a lot of money for the "Official Code of Georgia Annotated." The distinction here is fairly important -- but it's worth noting that the courts will regularly rely on the annotations in the official code, which more or less makes them a part of the law itself.
The article uses the word "ridiculous" only 10 times; they're taking it easy on the poor legislators.
If you can not access it, it does not apply to you (Score:2, Insightful)
In my opinion, if you can not freely access a law, then it should not apply to you. Apparently ignorance of the law is no defence either.
The law and the state exist entirely to serve the people and make civilisation function. Law makers repeatedly forget that it does not exist to benefit them.
Oh well, tax me silly and bully my peers, we all die some day. Long live neo-feudalism!
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Oh, that is so cute!
Meta data? (Score:3)
Note to editors: the article has been updated to strike out part of the that you have quoted in TFS. You should probably update that as well.
So, the annotations are not part of the law. They are comments about the manner in which the law was applied in certain cases, no?
Devil's Advocate...while yes, you can't copyright the law, are you saying you can't copyright things written about the law? How about textbooks used by law schools?
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I'm rather disappointed to see that this comment is so far down the list, but it's exactly right, as far as I understand.
The law itself isn't being claimed, but the notes and analysis are. It's the same analysis one could get by going to a library and poring over case history for a few years, but presented in a concise and topical format. You don't really need that information to know the law. You might need that information to defend yourself optimally in a court case, in which case the normal and reasonab
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However, because the state itself is filing suit, it is claiming ownership of those annotations. That's fine, but the state is not permitted to hold copyrights because it is a body of the people.
So, either Georgia owns the annotations and so they're free for all or Georgia does not, and so has no standing to sue.
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Well if things said about the law are used by lawmakers and judges to interpret the laws then yes, they should not be copyrightable. If a Harvard law textbook was being used by lawyers and judges to prosecute the law, then that textbook's copyright should be null and void also. Otherwise the law cannot apply equally to all.
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Those things are other case decisions, which are not copyrightable. But the annotations, linking the decisions to the cases in concise and useful ways is copyrightable. See my other replies in this thread. Malamud is wrong.
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Copyrightable by whom? The state? That would be a new and disturbing precident.
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States have always been able to hold copyrights. Wouldn't be new. Disturbing? Yes. New? No.
Re:Meta data? (Score:5, Informative)
Other note: I said the author updated the article. He updated it to link to the state of Georgia website, which he says links directly to the annotated code, calling it the "official code of Georgia." He did not follow his own link. The link goes to the unannotated code, hosted by LexisNexis, which identifies itself as "LexisNexis, author of the annotated code." But yeah, following Georgia's link gets you to the unannotated code, which is the official Georgia code.
Yeah yeah, I'm a "copyright is evil and information wants to be anthropomphized" guy, but while copyright exists, I think Georgia is right. This is not the law. The annotations are links to cases where that law was applied. Judges would follow those links and cite the previous decisions, as applicable, never the annotation.
In other states annotations are published and sold by a third party, like WestLaw. The difference here is Georgia owns the annotations itself and sells them to lawyers. If it's no longer worthwhile to do so, what will happen is Georgia will stop commissioning LexisNexis to produce the annotated code, LexisNexis will do it itself and sell copies to both lawyers and the state of Georgia, which will purchase them for judges and prosecutors. Malamud will definitely not win publishing annotations copyrighted by LexisNexis, and now instead of the annotations being revenue neutral (or profitable), the profits will all go to LexisNexis. So, meh.
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And another thing: if Malamud thinks annotations are super-important for a free society and understanding the law...great! Your organization should dedicate itself to compiling and publishing annotated state laws. The codes are public domain. The decisions are public domain. Slog through them and pick out relevant bits of decisions and link them to laws in a useful way. Make an open source platform to do it, like a "Wikipedia for laws" where anybody can annotate their state's laws.
But right now you can't ju
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They're not. The annotations are essentially links to case decisions, and the judge would cite those case decisions, not the annotation. No judge ever cites an annotation.
Re: Meta data? (Score:4, Informative)
That's not true. I'm an appellate attorney and plenty of judges have cured annotations when they couldn't find a better cite.
Check the stacks, there are plenty of examples.
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Or you could enlighten us.
Someone doesn't understand how this works (Score:2, Informative)
Lets start by clearing something up. The GA legislature creates and passes the statutes - the actual law. The text of the statute is not subject to copyright. The lawsuit does not address the text of the statute. Courts issue decisions interpreting and applying the law. Neither statutes nor court decisions are subject to copyright.
What the lawsuit focuses on are the ANNOTATIONS. The annotations are short topical summaries that briefly explain what a court said about the statute. An annotation is writte
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This is 100% true. The contents of the annotations are summaries of cases written by someone other than the court (sometimes the court's staff but most often by an indexing service like Lexis), and aren't actually law. Their sole purpose is to identify to attorneys and judges which cases stand for which principles. They are never even a complete statement of the law of that case, since they are usually a short paragraph long and only mention one of many issues the court dealt with. Half the time, the case i
Re:Someone doesn't understand how this works (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, and if LexisNexis owns the copyright they can sue, but the State would have no standing to do so. No more than I can sue you for pirating a Disney movie.
The fact that the state is suing implies that THEY are claiming copyright ownership. And while I'm not 100% certain about Georgia, that would certainly not fly if the federal government were the one making the claim - as an agent of the people, any works owned by the government are automatically placed in the public domain.
Who wrote those annotations? And who paid for it? (Score:3, Insightful)
What the lawsuit focuses on are the ANNOTATIONS. The annotations are short topical summaries that briefly explain what a court said about the statute. An annotation is written by someone who works for a publisher, after reading a court case.
This case may very well hinge upon "who wrote them?". If as you say, written by someone who works for a publisher, that publisher would hold copyright (on those annotations alone!) and would be the party going to court.
But it seems it's the state going to court here. Which means it's the state believing it holds copyright here. Read: state employee(s) writing those annotations. In which case this lawsuit would be a non-starter, regardless of whether those annotations are deemed essential for understanding
irrelevant (Score:3)
He is publishing the "Official Code of Georgia", published under the "Authority of the State of Georgia". Either the annotations are an essential and/or official part of Georgia law, in which case they should not be copyrighted, or they are a convenient additional aid for lawyers, in which case they shouldn't be part of the "Official Code of Georgia" "Published Under Authority of the State of Georgia" and published separately and given no special preference to
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- State works (including state laws, cases, their website, everything) can be copyrighted. Only federal works are exempt from copyright.
- The provided link only posts a listing of the unannotated laws.
- Georgia can own the copyright, even if someone else wrote the annotations, as long as the author was an employee or they assigned their interest to the State.
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I think what you meant is that the judicial system is no longer working as ORIGINALLY designed, which is entirely correct. Now to some degree that was necessary. We, as a people, no longer desire some of the results which the original system was designed to produce (such as protecting slavery). However, we have allowed a class of people (
Jury Nullification at least (Score:2)
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As a resident of Georgia this would be ONE case I would not mind being on the jury for. As with so many things that this State's legislature does this is beyond absurd. If this is being published by the State of Georgia as an official document then it should fall under the Open Records Act.
And since it's not, then you'd be a typical uninformed jury member who has made up his mind based on what one media source says about something.
As others have noted, this is not an "official document" and the statutes are not subject to copyright. It's a bunch of third party commentary about the statute that is subject to copyright, much like a textbook or treatise or thesis.
Title appears wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless I misread the summary, or it is wrong, Carl Malamud is not being sued for publishing Georgia laws, as it states you can do that freely. He's being sued for publishing annotations on Georgia laws that he copied from elsewhere.
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The courts regularly rely on the official annotations to rule on cases, thereby making them a part of the law.
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The courts regularly rely on the official annotations to rule on cases, thereby making them a part of the law.
While everyone is focusing on the copyright angle, I find that interesting.
If the court is unable to understand the laws without Cliff's Notes, there's something wrong with the laws themselves.
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No they don't. The annotations are summeries of case law. The courts will cite that case law, not the annotations.
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You can't necessarily argue that just because the state paid for something, it needs to become public property. But I will agree that unless there is a good reason why not, it should. While the annotations are not strictly necessary for an understanding of the law (you can look up the relevant case law the annotations depend upon), I think it would be a good thing in this case to make them freely available.
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But has the idea of copyrighting a legal code ever been tested by the SCOTUS? And if the decision was unfavorable, do we have to buy the text from iTunes now?
Banks vs Manchester. Law, no. Indexes by publisher (Score:5, Informative)
The Court ruled in Banks v Manchester that case law cannot be copyrighted. The ruling was that writings by a government official, acting in their official capacity, are owned by the public and cannot have copyright protection. That case also brought up a question relevant to this case. Under federal law citizens and residents may hold copyright. Georgia is probably neither, and therefore arguably cannot hold copyright.
In the Banks case, the state had contracted with someone else to produce indexes, etc. The deal was that if the company wrote these extra pieces, they would have copyright protectionfor a couple of years - they didn't get paid to write them, but were allowed exclusive right to sell their version with indexes, etc. The indexes and such were the original work of that citizen. That original work, but not the law itself, could be copyright the author.The finding in this Georgia case may hinge on who wrote the annotations. If government officials wrote them, it's public domain. If a private company wrote the annotations in order to sell them, they may be allowed to do so. HOWEVER, the fact that the STATE is suing indicates the state claims copyright for themselves, and the state will probably lose.
Also, the Court will probably want the law to be accessible, so they'll likely find some logic to rule against the state. Consider the Obamacare care case. The court ruled that the IRS "penalty" for not having insurance is a tax, and therefore within the powers granted to the feds, while also ruling is NOT a tax, and therefore didn't have to originate in the house of representatives. So in the very same ruling they said "it's a tax ... it's not a tax". Translation: we don't want to go head to head with the Obama administration on this one. They sometimes FIND a way to rule whichever way they want to rule, whether of makes any sense or not.
Re:Banks vs Manchester. Law, no. Indexes by publis (Score:5, Informative)
Obamacare did originate in the House as HR 3590. (HR meaning House of Representatives.) It was a "shell bill" that was gutted and stuffed with Obamacare to get around the rule. It's not a novel approach either, and the courts took no issue with it.
HR 3590 passed the House first as required, went to the Senate which altered it into Obamacare and then congress "resolved the differences" between the House and Senate versions passed before sending it to the president.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/... [congress.gov]
The rational behind starting tax bills in the HR is that it's "closer to the electorate" - or was before Senators were elected by popular vote. Now, the differences between the two as far as being held to the will of the people is lessened.
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Re:Banks vs Manchester. Law, no. Indexes by publis (Score:5, Insightful)
Largely, I expect, because that was the principle in effect in the British Parliament. It's a common feature of most, if not all, bicameral legislative assemblies, and it dates back to that division of powers between the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Britain. The problem comes from the fact that the US Senate is elected, and thus it gains the democratic legitimacy to significantly tamper with bills. It's a debate being had in Canada right now, where we're trying to decide whether to reform or abolish our Senate. The fear up here is that an elected Senate (Canada's Senators are appointed by the Governor General in the name of the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister) would become like the US Senate, a competitor to the lower house, and that the supervisory role would be abandoned. Even in the UK the Lords' tendency to try to overrule the House of Commons reached the point where the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 were pushed through and give the Government an override power at second reading so the Lords cannot block a bill.
Re:Banks vs Manchester. Law, no. Indexes by publis (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem comes from the fact that the US Senate is elected,
No, the problem comes from the fact that the U.S. government no longer considers itself bound to follow the Constitution. The rest of your post indicates what causes this problem. The legitimacy of the various parts of the U.S. government to do ANYTHING is supposed to come from the U.S. Constitution, not from "democratic legitimacy". The various states yielded their sovereignty to the federal government under the understanding that the federal government would be constrained by the Constitution, not free to do anything which was not opposed by the democratically expressed will of the people..
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This. A thousands times this. Should be modded to positive infinity.
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There's no good way to come up with a hard line against this kind of practice. If we're going to allow bills to evolve as they pass between both houses, then how would one quantify sufficient "gutting and stuffing" to cross a threshold of "is not allowed"?
I realise it's tempting to say things like "The government isn't bound to follow the Constitution", and some political persuasions love to do that without either understanding the Constitution or how law works. We need reasonably bright (even if not necess
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Of course, it would be even easier if the people in Congress actually took their oath of office seriously to support and defend the Constitution.
Personally, I would like to see every bill contain a reference to where in the Constitution Congress is given t
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How do you quantify resemblance?
There's nothing unconstitutional about what happened. Maybe you'd like to amend the Constitution to make some parts of it unconstitutional - maybe even some of those amendments would be ok if they were practical and enforcable, but your attempt to portray yourself a defending the Constitution here against assailants is ridiculous - you just don't like the way our system works. Which is fine, it's just the posing that's off.
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In the case of the ACA, the bill passed out of the Senate contained NONE of the language which was in the bill passed out of the House which it supposedly amended...not only that but it did not even contain any language relating to what the House bill was about.
You are correct that I do not like how our system works...and neither would the men who wrote the Constitution, nor would the m
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Nope. You're just documenting your own failure to understand how our kind of legal system works.
Re:Banks vs Manchester. Law, no. Indexes by publis (Score:4, Insightful)
The rational behind starting tax bills in the HR is that it's "closer to the electorate" - or was before Senators were elected by popular vote. Now, the differences between the two as far as being held to the will of the people is lessened.
This is just my worthless opinion but I feel the 17th Amendment should be repealed because ever since the 17th Amendment was ratified the state legislatures no longer have any voice in the federal government and now the whole system is grossly out of balance and state's rights are being slowly eroded into a unitary state. The people are already represented in the House of Representatives which makes a senate elected via the populace just redundant.
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If a private company wrote the annotations in order to sell them, they may be allowed to do so. HOWEVER, the fact that the STATE is suing indicates the state claims copyright for themselves, and the state will probably lose.
The filing itself (as linked to in the techdirt article) says:
The copyrighted annotations include analysis and guidance that are added to the O.C.G.A. by a third party publisher of the O.C.G.A. as a work for hire.
So, yes, Georgia is claiming ownership of the copyright by the state, not the 3rd party author.
Private Laws (Score:2)
Also, the Court will probably want the law to be accessible, so they'll likely find some logic to rule against the state.
Pretty much every state in the country has annotated laws that are owned by a private company under some kind of agreement with the state. The private company puts some money into indexing them, may have an el cheapo version available online, and charges very mysterious pricing for commercial use that varies by who your sales rep is and how big you are and the like. Physical copies may also be available.
In New York, for example, McKinney's costs about $10,500 for a physical copy: http://legalsolutions.tho [thomsonreuters.com]
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Why not crowd source the annotations, indexing, online publishing?
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Because the courts appear to use the annotated version for making decisions...and if your crowdsourced annotated version was the same as the other annotated version it would violate copyright.
FWIW, if the courts use the annotated version to make decisions, IMNSOH opinion, it should be considered the effective law, and therefore not copyrightable.
Re:Banks vs Manchester. Law, no. Indexes by publis (Score:5, Insightful)
My take-away from this is that the indexes and annotations may be subject to copyright by the private party that wrote them-- but from my experience working as a VA employer on policy and procedure manuals, with some indirect experience in handling material that was produced by contract workers, this would depend on the wording of the contract between the government and the private party. In most of those contracts the author is hired as an agent of the government and his relationship to his product is the same as that of any government worker to their assigned tasks, which means he cannot claim copyright and the work is in the public domain. There are major benefits to being an agent of the government and that is usually how this kind of thing is done.
That said, I don't see how Georgia could win this lawsuit, since if the material is copyrightable, the author, and not Georgia, would hold copyright and Georgia would have no standing in the matter. If the author was working as an agent of Georgia, then the work produced is in the public domain, and there is no valid copyright.
In either case the suit seems like a frivolous one, since if there is any copyright involved, Georgia cannot be the party that owns it.
Of course the defending party would be facing legal expenses to just get the case dismissed, and Georgia might be using that as a club to get an early out-of-court settlement. There is a term for legal battery but I don't recall it (coming up on my 10th year of retirement), and that is what Georgia might be attempting with this. Filing suit, even when you know that you cannot win in court but you think you could get an early out of court settlement, should be considered a breach of a lawyer's duty as an officer of the court. Lawyers who do this should be penalized, and in some cases disbarred. But that doesn't happen. That part of the legal system is totally broken.
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States are NOT restricted from holding copyright in general (only the federal government is). There are some exceptions to this, but they probably don't apply here.
On the face of it this seems like a perfectly legitimate complaint on the part of the state. The state is expected to assume the cost of producing the laws themselves (that's why we pay legislative salaries), and making those things freely available in order to enforce them, but the indexing, research, and reference work involved in creating an
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therefore post it online, and everyone wins (except the extortionists)
Re:Republicans have always said... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. (Score:5, Insightful)
The agenda may be that if ignorance of the law is no excuse, access to the law as it is interpreted by the courts should be free.
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Can the US federal government, or any state level government force you to buy stuff? If not, the law + annotations must either be free, or ignorance is actually a valid excuse.
Re:The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. (Score:5, Interesting)
For Cops, Ignorance of the Law Is an Excuse
http://www.vnews.com/opinion/1... [vnews.com]
Brought to you by SCOTUS, lapdogs of jackbooted persons throughout Murica.
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For Cops, Ignorance of the Law Is an Excuse
http://www.vnews.com/opinion/1... [vnews.com]
Brought to you by SCOTUS, lapdogs of jackbooted persons throughout Murica.
They are allowed to speed, wear guns in places that don't allow guns, etc., so why shouldn't they also be allowed to not know the law? If they don't have to obey it, they don't really need to know it. Well, other than to apply it to other people.
Re:The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
Louis D. Brandeis
When will we see another like him?
By the way, Timothy McVeigh used this quote to justify his heinous deed. My prediction is that we are going to see more and more "domestic terrorism", and not the Islamic kind. This is the result of government contempt for the people and the law.
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How can they enforce the law properly when they do not know it themselves?
Because enforcing the law properly is not a priority. This is proven almost daily as it is extremely rare for law enforcement officers to face any negative repercussions for failing to do so.
You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.
When the process = the punishment the law is. in effect, whatever a law enforcement officer decides it is on any given occasion and need not be consistent or comport with the letter of the law in any way.
Welcome to the police/surveillance state formerly known as the Unit
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force you to buy stuff?
Medical insurance.
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Why, yes! Didn't Obamacare conclusively settle that one?
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Re: The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. (Score:2, Informative)
You could also not buy the car, then you don't need the insurance. It's really no different from requiring manufacturers to build in seatbelts. Ultimately you're buying them with the car and thus are "required" to buy seatbelts. Of course you could also not buy the car and thereby not be required to buy seatbelts.
Re:The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's use car insurance as an example; something you are required by law to buy.
Millions of New Yorkers and other urban dwellers disagree with you. No one is required to own a car.
Re:The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. (Score:4, Informative)
You could not use a car. That may be uncomfortable to you and probably cost you your job, but it's not strictly a requirement for you to have a car.
On the other hand, I cannot simply opt out of the law. By the very definition of a law I cannot.
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If I stopped having a car I would have to move from where I live, as the nearest store is some six miles away; hardly an easy trek to do all the time to get groceries. For others that may, as you said, lose their job, not having a car isn't a realistic option either. So you get something that makes your life a LOT easier, but in doing so government mandates there is something else you HAVE to buy.
On the same logic you could stop paying the government and then not read the law. Sooner or later that is going
Re:The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. (Score:5, Informative)
Please keep in mind that I find it insane that the government can hide the law from its citizens; to have a free society the law has to be equal for everyone, and this more than anything else puts a divide between the haves and the have-nots.
I'll just leave this here.
"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Strat
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Noted! Anyone who quotes this rubbish cannot be taken seriously.
Noted! Anyone who dismisses a concept out of hand because of who said it rather than positing a counter-argument about what was said cannot be taken seriously.
Enjoy your self-imposed ignorance.
Strat
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Ok. So a stopped clock is right twice a day.
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???
I'm sorry, the logic of that proposition eludes me. You must be assuming postulates that I am unaware of. (Not one's I reject, that wouldn't confuse me, but perhaps one I have never heard.)
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There are some things that reasonably can be ascribed the quality of being a worthy candidate for ridicule.
Certainly the notion that a representative democracy would copyright its laws and attempt to control their distribution for profit or any other motive is worthy of ridicule.
AFAIK the motivation is almost always financial, usually in collusion with some big legal publisher who gets exclusive rights and kicks back to the state. But it's not hard to imagine some kind of conspiratorial intent to restrict
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Parent post has veered about 45 degrees off topic.
No one is saying the Georgia laws are under copyright. As with all government publications, those laws are in public domain.
Georgia is saying that a specific set of annotations is under copyright. That may or may not be true-- if the annotations were written by someone who was hired as an agent of Georgia's government, they were produced by that government and there is no copyright. They are public domain. Otherwise there is a copyright, but Georgia does n
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As an example, try to find the "stop and identify" law for G
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I was wondering... What are these "annotations"?
Are they creative interpretations of the law written by a third party? (probably copyright eligible but odd to have a third party creatively interpreting the law and having that used by the courts)
- Are they "indexes" (as some have stated)? (probably not copyright eligible since no "creative" work done)
- Are they "case law examples"? (probably not copyright eligible since these cases would be a product of the court system and therefore not copyright eligible)
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But more importantly, because the unannotated Georgia code is not available in whole to the public (only as tiny fragments you must dredge up one at a time from the hobbled lexis search site), the Annotated version -- which is
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Copyright law is not ridiculous. It exists so that creative folks can make money off their works. Without copyright, it is unlikely you, or any other consumer, will pay one red cent for copyrighted material.
While Georgia state laws are open source, the extra explanations for the laws, or "annotations," are not. An analogy to this case is, while the laws of physics
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Copyright law itself is not ridiculous. It serves a purpose and is generally a good idea. In its current form, it is. As useful as it could be, the way it is implemented is horribly broken, maybe beyond repair, and needs to be changed to be usable again.
Re: That's copyright for you (Score:2, Insightful)
Not if the annotations are the work of an entity required to give up all its copyright protections or otherwise prohibited from such enforcement of their copyrights
Which may be the case here, as it is the work of the state of Georgia.
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I never said they were subjective. While you are free to apply the laws of physics at no cost, learning and understanding those laws usually requires buying good physics books, which are not free.
Similarly, these annotations are probably more human-friendly readable version of the state laws. And like the physics textbooks, you have to pay to get access to them. Blame your lawmakers for not writing laws and explanations/examples/annotations in a human friendly manner.
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Here's the link, where you can view current and past Georgia state laws [justia.com]. I'm not sure if the laws are shown in full detail.
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I'm not sure if the laws are shown in full detail.
Gnupun,
They are not shown in full detail. That's my point. You can only view a tiny fragment of the Georgia code at a time. Just reading the law in sequence becomes a hugely tedious exercise, and this crippling is deliberately intended and sanctioned by the State of Georgia to force meaningful access through the lexis paid service.
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You are incorrect. On January 1st of every year in Georgia, including 2015, hundreds of new laws take effect. These make up the current year's code,mel@becknet.com which is then update again on July 1 with additional new laws. The library's have outdated codes, and a quick survey of several municipal libraries found none with code books newer than 2011, so libraries are not even updated annually. Ironically, the libraries I spoke with said only the lexis site has the current code. At least they kne
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I do not believe that access to the free law libraries is actually encoded in the laws as a right, at least not at the federal level. I certainly believe it is encoded in the spirit of the law ...
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said, "if a law isn't public, it isn't a law."
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Are the annotations creative works of a third party? If so, why are they being used to decide cases?
If they are "indexes" they are not eligible for copyright.
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Don't these annotations provide short, usable summaries to previous court cases? They most certainly are not just indexes. It's like a slashdot summary -- a few condensed paragraphs for an article containing dozens of paragraphs. A slashdot summary is also not an index, and is eligible for copyright.
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If they are summaries of cases, they probably could be considered creative works and eligible for copyright. However, if they are being used by the courts to decide cases, we would have the odd situation where a private party was writing law... and if they were then considered "law" then probably not eligible for copyright.
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These annotations are not being directly used to decide cases. Instead they are being used to quickly refer to previous cases and provide a quick summary. The private party writing the annotation is deciding nothing and your accusation is extremely ridiculous. The annotations can be covered by c
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You misread. OP specifically writes the current copyright laws. And yes, they are ridiculous: overbroad, ridiculously complicated, in part based on undemocratic "trade agreements", and with a copyright term that is utterly absurd, clearly meant not to protect the work itself, but to prevent competition from historical works with contemporary works. Just imagine each and every audio/visual recording from the 1970s and before becoming public domain, what an enormous wealth of culture would become available, f
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That serves the needs of the consumers, not the creators and
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Wow, that's quite a leap of judgement. With or without copyright, the publishers/distributors would still screw over the artists because they have a monopoly or at least they used to and artists have little common sense. Copyright law makes it a lot harder to screw artists, not harm
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That is the case with Federal government works, but are you sure it's also true about Georgia?
It absolutely *should* be, but what's does the law actualy say?
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Are lawmakers suing Malamud for breaking a public law or a pay-per-view law?
In Georgia, in order to find out, you need to either buy the law book or get brought up on charges for that law, in which case they will actually tell you the law for free in a court of law. Then they will charge you for breaking the law.
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We used to ridicule other countries for that sort of behavior.
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There are these things called libraries. They might have a copy.
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Most libraries that I have seen do not have a current copy of the state law. Granted, in my state that would fill several shelves from floor to ceiling. I've seen one copy of an abridged printing of the corporate law (not current at the time). It filled 4 bookshelves floor to ceiling.
What is being discussed here is not just the state law, but an annotated version, which is pretty much guaranteed to be considerably longer.
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