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

arstechnica.com

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

#61

Post by jcranmer »

wnissen wrote: post #53
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.

Very likely, the annotations have no controlling legal effect. The difference between unofficial and official versions of the text largely relies on which version will control the interpretation if there is a copying error (e.g., one says "remuneration" and one says "enumeration"). I suspect Georgia made the annotated code official on the basis that it's the copy that everyone already has.

Stripping out the annotations and publishing that should be completely kosher for copyright and would still give the controlling version of the law (assuming no copying errors were made, of course).

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

#62

Post by dpark »

wnissen wrote: post #53
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.

> It's not a mistake, the official version is the annotated version.

Joshuaheard is saying that making it the official version is a mistake. Not in the sense of "oops, we accidentally wrote down the wrong thing" but in the sense of "this is a bad idea caused by lack of foresight". Just as someone might say it's a mistake to ask a stranger in a bar to watch your bag while you go to the restroom. It's not an accident but it is a mistake.

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

#63

Post by vqc »

This is a problem for many of the municipalities in the United States. I'm not familiar with the history of how this ended up happening for Georgia, but for municipalities the cause is often the economics of codifying and publishing the official code.

Assembling the laws into a usable code is extremely labor intensive. Someone has to figure out where the new law fits into the old code and copy and paste as necessary. Governments often outsource the work to a third party vendor in order to free up internal human and monetary resources. The end effect is that the codifier controls the code.

There are all kinds of downstream effects. For one, computer-readable formats of the law are nonexistent. This also means that there is a huge barrier to creating interesting new technologies on top of the law.

I'm the cofounder at Open Law Library (http://www.openlawlib.org), a non-profit that is trying to fix this problem by introducing technology at all stages of the law making process. We're working with Washington D.C. right now, and you can find a glimpse into the future at https://beta.code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/code/ (bulk downloads available at the link at the bottom).

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

#64

Post by cowardlydragon »

vqc wrote: post #63

This is a problem for many of the municipalities in the United States. I'm not familiar with the history of how this ended up happening for Georgia, but for municipalities the cause is often the economics of codifying and publishing the official code. Assembling the laws into a usable code is extremely labor intensive. Someone has to figure out where the new law fits into the old code and copy and paste as necessary.…

Oh, I'm sorry, is the poor burden of publishing the laws of a government too hard for the big bad government to possibly do or fund?

Of course the solution is to make it copyrighted / restricted / owned by a third party corporation.

What? Simplify laws or properly fund the ancillary tasks entailed in changing laws? Blasphemy.

This is corruption, nothing else.

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

#65

Post by cowardlydragon »

ivraatiems wrote: post #18
bighi wrote: post #7

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 important to note that Georgia is one state out of fifty; most states don't do this and many have the entire body of their laws available online from the official source, not a third-party provider (And federal law certainly is as well.) 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, an…

And Georgia sucks. Not as bad as Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, or Arkansas.

But definitely in the next tier. At least it is gradually entering North Carolina territory.

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

#66

Post by dzdt »

soundwave106 wrote: post #58
77pt77 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The defendant here got their initial copy of the law by such an open records request! See the mention of $1207.02 in the first paragraph, that amount being the copying fee. The state here is insisting he cannot distribute further copies. Anyone else can request a copy from the state via open records law, and again pay the "nominal" copying fee (or pay a smaller fee to Lexus-Nexus for access). What you cannot do is get a copy for free, or make a copy for anyone else if you paid for one!

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

#67

Post by cmurf »

Long live the Confederacy! That's all this is, aristocrats who believe in pay to play. There is no right to be part of civilized society, you must be useful, in which case you can pay to play. If you're not useful you can wither and die.

They lost the war, so now it's this neo-feudal free market applied to everything. The democratic free marketers should be bothered by this because they're going to take your system to its natural conclusion: the gangs of New York.

Voting is also becoming pay to play. You must pay $$ for a government issued photo ID that proves you're a citizen if you want to vote. And this can effectively be any amount of money, established by the necessary cost of production, using patented, proprietary technology owned by a corporation.

It's corporatocracy, kakistocracy, plutocracy, aristocracy - all in one.

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

#68

Post by hospes »

Roboprog wrote: post #48

Yeah, some days I think the US civil war was a mistake, and the south should have just become a separate country. Sort of a "Mexico North", or something. With apologies to otherwise intelligent people that have to live in that hell hole...

There is no hell hole in south, please do not dramatize things. Travel to south then go to east and west, you will see that if you are in big cities they are not that different from each other. Rural areas on the other hand are different from the cities.

There is a widespread lack of education across the country mostly in rural areas and in poor urban areas. But it is not only south issue that is an issue all over the country. Combine that with wealth inequality and we get what we have.

You can see the same trends in elections, big cities mostly go blue or even dark blue, even in traditionally conservative states.

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

#69

Post by talmand »

M_Grey wrote: post #20
talmand wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was literally founded on those things, in the sense that the original inhabitants were about 50% indentured and they built the damned place. Saying that the US wasn't founded on these realities is like saying the AU wasn't founded as a prison colony.

So, by your logic, anything happening during a country's founding we deem today as bad means that country was founded on those bad things. Then every single country on Earth in all of human history was founded on bad things.

That's silly logic.

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