Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 88 posts

Re: If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

#51

Post by csneeky »

ar0 wrote: post #31
csneeky wrote: post #17

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…

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 annota…

I don't know what is means for something to be "official" in this context. I do think they (the Law and the metadata) should be clearly separated and what is free should really be free, and what isn't should be made available as per whatever terms Georgia negotiated.

If Georgia fucked those terms up and are bound by something we all feel isn't reasonable it needs to be stated, and I think we might be doing just that here on HN.

Re: If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

#52

Post by Erik816 »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #41
flyaway wrote: post #5

> [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…

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…

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.

Re: If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

#53

Post by wnissen »

joshuaheard wrote: post #43

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.

Re: If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

#54

Post by csneeky »

roderickm wrote: post #34
csneeky wrote: post #17

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…

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 c…

Could not agree more. I think this is a great point and I hope Georgia does what it can to renegotiate whatever deal it made to this end (making it all clear and free) when it gets the chance. If that is indeed the problem here.

Re: If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

#55

Post by Chaebixi »

joshuaheard wrote: post #43

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.

> 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.

Re: If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

#56

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

Erik816 wrote: post #52
MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I'm making the realpolitik assumption that many if not most judges, especially elected ones at the county level, are not purely impartial and will tend to side with the prosecution all other things being equal.

It's not that I think all judges and prosecutors are evil authoritarians, it's just that there are a bunch of externalities at play:

- If they are elected, they'll want to be seen as pro law and order

- They probably know and work more closely with a smaller set of prosecutors than defense lawyers, and could develop interpersonal biases favoring them

- Related to above, far more judges are former prosecutors or corporate lawyers than defense or public interest lawyers

- And there's the general pessimism/dislike towards (accused and actual) lawbreakers that many on the inside of the judicial system are prone to develop after decades of dealing mostly with that segment of the population

Not to discount your experience as a clerk, but those were your complaints, not the judges you worked for, no? Do any of my points above accord with your experience, or am I totally off base?

Re: If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

#57

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

Freak_NL wrote: post #46
JimmyM wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see 403 in Chrome DevTools, though.

For compatibility reasons perhaps? I would expect evergreen browsers such as Firefox and Chrome to handle a proper HTTP 451 without issues though.

Any browser should. Any 4xx HTTP status code is an error.

Re: If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

#58

Post by soundwave106 »

77pt77 wrote: post #16
gersh wrote: post #15

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.

Georgia does have a public records law (http://legal.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/images/186385699...). It would be interesting to see how the concept of annotations hidden behind a LexisNexis paywall meshes with open records laws here and elsewhere. At casual glance, the notions don't seem to jive very well if (as seems to be implied in articles) the annotations are not just private analysis, but are used as the basis of public law itself.

(Note, in Googling, I see this issue has been brought up in at least one legal blog -- https://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2011/07/15/tear-down-thi... -- and apparently is a problem in not just Georgia.)

Re: If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

#59

Post by parenthephobia »

csneeky wrote: post #17

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…

> 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."

Re: If you publish Georgia's state laws, you'll get sued for copyright and lose

#60

Post by Shendare »

flyaway wrote: post #5

> [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…

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.

Post reply on HN