11–20 of 88 posts
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.
If we're talking about actual democracy, we might even say it never started.
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 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?
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).
> [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…
Can a defense attorney in Georgia argue their client couldn't obey the law because they couldn't afford to know the law?
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).
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?
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]
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that a trend, and not just the reality this country was founded on? How many of the original people here were either indentured, or just enslaved? We just keep shuffling the verbiage and the optics every few decades while refining the overall system. Slavery in prisons, rotating jail terms for people who can't pay fines for arbitrary crap, no education, no hope, and no voice.
I wouldn't say the country was "founded" on such things. Yes, they were interwoven into the fabric of the country at the time; but the country was also created in a way that opened the door to remove those things. As for your last sentence; that's the inevitable outcome of almost all civilizations which is why revolutions happen at a somewhat steady rate.