Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online • Hacker News Board

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#151

Post by gumby » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #145

gumby wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Republic of Georgia claims that the legal code establishing the rights and obligations of its citizens...should not be freely available to its citizens The federal government of the United States claims this as well, for example see Gilmore v. Gonzales . You are subject to classified laws and regulation to which you do not have access.

> The federal government of the United States claims this as well, for example see Gilmore v. Gonzales. That's not entirely correct: http://volokh.com/posts/1134369043.shtml > Now, just to be clear, I have no idea whether the TSA's decision not to publish the text of its regulations is a smart one. I can understand why they don't publish the names on the No-Fly list, but it's not obvious to me why they can't publish…

Eugene Volokh is a lawyer and I am not, but I feel he is hairsplitting here. Regulations written to implement acts of congress are considered "regulatory law" and can be litigated in criminal, not civil court; you can be arrested for violating them etc. They swim, fly and quack like a duck.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#152

Post by dang » Mon, May 13, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #83

dfxm12 wrote: post #73

The state is saying Malamud called his own actions "terrorism". I think it's irresponsible how the lawyers worded this in their suit. I also think it's irresponsible for the NYT to print this without this context. From the suit[0]: Carl Malamud, has indicated that this type of strategy has been a successful form of “terrorism” that he has employed in the past to force government entities to publish documents on Malam…

Mods, do you mind fixing up the title? This fact is relevant and leads to confusion among the commenters.

Ok, I've taken a crack at it.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#153

Post by SeanLuke » Mon, May 13, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #14

The Republic of Georgia claims that the legal code establishing the rights and obligations of its citizens (including annotations commissioned and approved by the state) should not be freely available to its citizens or anyone else, because it is copyrighted by the state. According to the article, 20 other states around the world are making similar copyright claims. The written laws of a state (along with annotations…

> The Republic of Georgia

What is this?

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#154

Post by baybal2 » Mon, May 13, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

torstenvl wrote: post #133

baybal2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA has very little in terms of law on personal liabilities of officials and their scope. The dismal legal history for USA CFR 25 11.448 - abuse of office is a proof of that. USA is one of few countries where there is close to nothing amounting to codified criminal abuse of office laws, the few criminal abuse of office laws are state level in USA. The wider official crimes class of offences, is also poorly represente…

You make three major errors. The first is that you conflate "criminal abuse of office laws" with the "acknowledgement that completely useless/incompetent people must be kicked out from official positions." The U.S. government is not required to convict someone of a crime in order to terminate their employment. Federal civilian labor law is an entire field of practice that is... quite verdant. The second major error i…

Silly me. Yes, totally mistook title 25 for 5, while it was buzzing in my head. Once again, I'm reminded why we have lawyers, and why google is not a proper legal search engine. Yet, the point that most of official offences are not a matter of title 18 (criminal code) stands

I give you +1 for a good, substantiated argument

But still, US has very lax stance on official responsibility, and very fundamentally on the idea of whether a failure to perform duty in office or required specific performances pass as an offence for an official.

> Making poor job performance a crime, for someone with no mens rea, is inherently totalitarian and abusive.

Does US has a stance on failure in official duty being mens rea defensible? A number of Western democratic state don't think so. I'm not meaning for something like an ordinary clerk failing to show at work being a case of it, but for government officers with highest levels of responsibility — positions onto which people certainly don't get by simple promotion.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#155

Post by moefh » Mon, May 13, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #148

moefh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These annotations do not appear to be essential to understanding the law At least 3 judges disagree with this (quoted from the article): > “The annotations clearly have authoritative weight in explicating and establishing the meaning and effect of Georgia’s laws,” Judge Stanley Marcus wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the court

The Eleventh Circuit’s decision turns more on the annotations being published under the authority of the State than the fact that judges and lawyers “reference” them. Courts routinely reference the Restatements, for example, but those are private works.

To an outsider like me, this situation seems bizarre; please correct me if this is wrong, but...

It seems like you're arguing that it's reasonable to keep these annotations private because it's already impossible to understand the law without other stuff that is private, not because these annotations are not essential to understanding the law.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#156

Post by verelo » Mon, May 13, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #125

verelo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it sounds like a hell of a lot of work to re-evaluate every law every X number of years. Probably not the best use of time...

Sounds like a hell of a lot of work for the judiciary to sort through the morass created by never acknowledging or dealing with increasing anachronistic cruft created by "pass it once" legislation. To the point a citizen sans law degree (or to a point with one) doesn't necessarily know where they stand. Laws are, and should be treated as maintenance items. If you can't be bothered to have a token yes vote, it doesn't…

I’m all for the experiment, something tells me the expiration of something important will pass (maybe an important civil liberty?) and we might realize law makers intentionally delayed and let it lapse? I just think it comes with some side effects that could look innocent but depending who wants what to happen could be used to let things go away silently. Ie environmental laws when the government wants to allow mineral extraction but public sentiment would never allow it.

I’d love to type more but I’m on my phone and down to one thumb due to an injury. Sorry for not engaging more on this!

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#157

Post by JdeBP » Mon, May 13, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

JdeBP wrote: post #76

Actually, xe wasn't. The legal brief from the plaintiff, hyperlinked from the NYT article, dated 2015, actually says: > Defendant’s founder and president, Carl Malamud, has indicated that this type of strategy has been a successful form of “terrorism” that he has employed in the past to force government entities to publish documents on Malamud’s terms. See Exhibit 2. * https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/ga/pro_v_ge…

Note that when I wrote this, the headline here was still the NYT's headline.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#158

Post by whoopdedo » Mon, May 13, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

amyjess wrote: post #111

stupidcar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The text of the laws themselves are open-source. It's the annotations that are the issue and this is, at least, an area where there is a reasonable ambiguity. Hopefully one that will be resolved in favour of greatest openness, but the state's position is at least not totally unreasonable. What is unreasonable, and why this is getting attention on HN is because Malamud's actions in publish the annotations has been des…

> What is unreasonable, and why this is getting attention on HN is because Malamud's actions in publish the annotations has been described as "terrorism". He described his own actions as "terrorism", and the state is throwing that back in his face by basically going "See, even he called it 'terrorism'! That means he knew what he was doing was wrong!"

Earlier in that essay he talked about a "coup". So I suppose he should be charged with insurrection as well.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#159

Post by inflatableDodo » Mon, May 13, 2019, 7:07 PM UTC

gnode wrote: post #19

ohiovr wrote: post #4

I do not understand this story. How can law be "under copyright"?

It technically isn't. The annotations in question are expert's analyses of the law, approved by the state. The defendant was told he could publish the actual law, and his own analysis. However it gets really murky when “Georgia’s courts have cited to the annotations as authoritative sources on statutory meaning and legislative intent.” I can see the argument against this being freely publishable. If I wrote a textboo…

>If I wrote a textbook which explains some badly written and archaic laws really well, and lawyers and judges started to look to it as the de facto law, should that void my copyright?

Given copyright only exists under the law, in the rare case that this happens, a sensible fudge would be to make a compulsary purchase of the copyright for the assessed market value, so it can become public domain. Much in the same way as you would do for any other property when you need to build municipal infrastructure through it. The law is essentially municipal infrastructure anywazy, so it isn't that much of a legal stretch.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#160

Post by amyjess » Mon, May 13, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

whoopdedo wrote: post #158

amyjess wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is unreasonable, and why this is getting attention on HN is because Malamud's actions in publish the annotations has been described as "terrorism". He described his own actions as "terrorism", and the state is throwing that back in his face by basically going "See, even he called it 'terrorism'! That means he knew what he was doing was wrong!"

Earlier in that essay he talked about a "coup". So I suppose he should be charged with insurrection as well.

Well, that's the thing. He's not being charged with terrorism. They're just throwing his self-description back in his face as a rhetorical device, to persuade a judge or jury that he knew what he was doing was wrong.

It's really petty and juvenile for them to do this, but they aren't making an actual allegation of terrorism.