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

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

#71

Post by M_Grey »

talmand wrote: post #69
M_Grey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, that isn't my logic and isn't what I said. In the case of the US it's been a continuous legacy that began with indentured servitude and slavery, continued through slavery and sharecropping, and now exists today in various forms including in prisons.

If you can't or won't argue the points I'm actually making, don't try to inject your own version of what you think I might be saying.

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

#73

Post by csneeky »

parenthephobia wrote: post #59
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, ci…

We can also give Georgia the benefit of the doubt and assume there was a decision maker involved in this at some point who (rightly and in good faith) thought annotations might be a great thing to add to the official law to make it more robust/useful. And they had no idea of the potential negative consequences of the way they went about procuring and labeling the resulting artifact.

We have enough mistrust in the government these days and I think labels like "protection racket" should be saved for times when we really need them.

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

#74

Post by aanm1988 »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #45
gremlinsinc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If America were a democracy, there's a big difference between Republic and Democracy

I see these comments without fail whenever anybody mentions the term democracy. Everybody knows what is meant by the term, your pedantry is neither insightful, nor interesting, its just distracting, pointless noise. Please stop.

It's also incorrect. A democracy and a republic are not mutually exclusive.

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

#75

Post by aanm1988 »

talmand wrote: post #10
M_Grey wrote: post #6

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.

It required a civil war to remove slavery. The country was not built to have war as the mechanism for change.

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

#76

Post by licyeus »

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...

The problem isn't exclusive to Georgia (or the South). The State of Oregon also filed suit (later dismissed, IIRC) against Malamud for republishing their laws. And most progressive cities publish their official code through 3rd parties with restrictive copyright attached.

This problem exists for all of America.

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

#77

Post by Erik816 »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #56
Erik816 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I think some of those factors are relevant, others less so. For example, in most jurisdictions judges are probably seeing the same defense lawyers just as much as they are seeing the same prosecutors. Also, whether it is beneficial to be "tough on crime" will depend on the jurisdiction. And then of course you have Federal Judges, who are appointed for life and thus not subject to that factor. I clerked for a Federal Judge in San Francisco, and he was very liberal. He thought through each case carefully and definitely wanted to know all of the relevant law, whether that came from the parties or from my own research.

But, even if all of those factors are in play, the most conservative, "tough on crime" judge sure as hell better care more about the rule of law than they do about an outcome in any one particular case. They need both parties to accurately represent what the law is so they can make correct decisions, even when those decisions are sometimes judgement calls that might more often go for the defense or the prosecution depending on the particular judge. Realpolitik should not infringe on respect for the rule of law, and to the extent it has that is a serious problem. I understand being cynical, but if that is how intelligent people view our judicial system working, then we are screwed as a country.

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

#78

Post by khedoros1 »

jcranmer wrote: post #61
wnissen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 annotatio…

A law gets passed. Years later, a court case comes up about it that changes the way that the law is usually interpreted. There's nothing in the law itself that links those two occurrences, but the legal case has essentially clarified and/or rewritten the original law. The annotations would link those. Sure, you could read through both parts of the law (the codes and the court cases), and presumably that's what Lexisnexis did, but it doesn't seem like the unannotated state law would be practically useful, because it won't transparently reflect what the actual controlling version of the law is.

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

#79

Post by jcranmer »

khedoros1 wrote: post #78
jcranmer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 annotatio…

A law gets passed. Years later, a court case comes up about it that changes the way that the law is usually interpreted. There's nothing in the law itself that links those two occurrences, but the legal case has essentially clarified and/or rewritten the original law. The annotations would link those. Sure, you could read through both parts of the law (the codes and the court cases), and presumably that's what Lexisn…

The same is true even when the official version of the law is unannotated. The annotations themselves have no legal bearing, but they are immensely useful for tracking down court cases and (presumably) the legislative sources and discussions about the law to divine legislative intent. That's why lawyers have annotated copies of law on their shelves instead of unannotated ones, even if the annotated text isn't technically the controlling copy.

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

#80

Post by parenthephobia »

csneeky wrote: post #73
parenthephobia wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, ci…

We can also give Georgia the benefit of the doubt and assume there was a decision maker involved in this at some point who (rightly and in good faith) thought annotations might be a great thing to add to the official law to make it more robust/useful. And they had no idea of the potential negative consequences of the way they went about procuring and labeling the resulting artifact. We have enough mistrust in the gov…

> We can also give Georgia the benefit of the doubt

Something I might be inclined to do if they fixed the problem after becoming aware of it.

Did Georgia arrange a deal whereby its citizens can read the law of their land for free?

Did they declare the annotations were no longer considered part of the law?

Or did they spend tax-payer money on prosecuting somebody for having the temerity to make copies of the law?

I think it is not at all reasonable to give Georgia the benefit of the doubt.

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