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Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

nytimes.com

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Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#171

Post by inflatableDodo »

torstenvl wrote: post #168
inflatableDodo wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

This is not a "rare case" at all. Judicial opinions frequently cite private materials such as the Restatements, law review articles, Black's Law Dictionary, paywalled scientific literature, and so on.

Are the Restatements, law review articles, Black's Law Dictionary and the paywalled scientific literature cited then 'de facto law'?

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#172

Post by criddell »

bluGill wrote: post #164
gnode wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is indeed a problem, but doesn't appear to be the issue in this case. In a sense, this is the opposite. It's more like: The law says: pressure vessels must be pretty sturdy even when really hot. A standard comes along and proclaims to abide by said law, while fleshing out the details of how sturdy and how hot. Lawyers and judges then make reference to it as what the law always meant, and effectively give it lega…

There should be a difference. If I show my pressure vessel fits the standard the court can accept that under the assumption that the standard is good. Or I can go back to first principals of engineering and show the court that my vessel is correct.

As long as you have a design that a P.E. signed off on, you are fine in the eyes of the court. Your insurance company might have a different opinion though.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#173

Post by baybal2 »

baybal2 wrote: post #42
Nasrudith wrote: post #2

Really the abuse of "terrrorism" so blatantly even by the standards of a government should qualify for some pretty damn harsh defamation law to the officials trying to hide behind the state. Those sorts of abuses of power are the kind of thing where we actually do need to be "tough on crime" for if we wish to be remotely free.

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…

Edit above, "The dismal legal history for USA CFR 25 11.448 - abuse of office is a proof of that."

Abuse of office happened not be the part of Ch.11 of US Criminal code (Title 18, not 25) as was told by a comment below

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#174

Post by vajrabum »

klyrs wrote: post #137
vajrabum wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you notice that Mozilla plugins broke the other day because somebody forgot to renew a certificate? The law is the framework that our society runs on and business and pretty much ever other activity is a plugin. So do you really want to set us up for breaking the plugins because the cert (law) has expired when the legislature was too busy or forgot to renew? BTW, like any other organization legislatures have limi…

> Replacing or even renewing the law for a modern technological society is not going to be a semester project for some script kiddies (legislators). If only we had some kind of distributed system that could be used, to maintain a complex codebase with thousands of contributors... oh wait we already have git. Imagine if federal law was a monorepo, and state, county, city laws were branches. It sounds like a nightmare…

None of that is going to help with the problem of you have a relatively tiny number of "committers" (legislators).

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#175

Post by SeanLuke »

forgottenpass wrote: post #169
SeanLuke wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Republic of Georgia What is this?

A name for the state of Georgia. Most U.S. states have a few names, some unofficial names- like "Rhode Island" - are very popular (the name of that state is actually "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations"). The inclusion of "republic" means it's probably a hangover rooted in colonial, revolutionary, and/or confederate time periods.

> A name for the state of Georgia

Where is "The Republic of Georgia" documented as a common name for Georgia?

"The Republic of Georgia" was the name of the country Georgia prior to the breakup of the USSR.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#176

Post by colejohnson66 »

magashna wrote: post #110
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…

Aren't these annotations paid for with taxes? If so, it belongs to the people

There’s exceptions. It’s how JBL keeps its stuff secret even though it’s funded by NASA

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#177

Post by mamon »

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…

> I can see the argument against this being freely publishable. 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?

I would expect any reasonable government to do one of:

- Write their own, non-copyrighted version of the law in question.

- Pay you decent amout of money and become copyright owner prior to including your textbook in the official law code.

I think that's the primary difference between civil and common law: in civil law legal system you cannot have "de facto laws" - either something is codified in form of (non-copyrtightable) parlimentary bill or executive order, or is not a law at all.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#178

Post by kragen »

Probably worth noting that putting court precedents from PACER free online on RECAP was what launched the first FBI investigation into Carl Malamud's friend, my friend, Aaron Swartz. They had to close the investigation after they figured out that unfortunately (from their perspective) everything Aaron had done was actually legal, but when they got another chance with the JSTOR incident, their friends at the US Attorney's office hounded him to suicide.

Carl, fortunately, is a bit more laid-back than Aaron was — I don't think suicide is in the cards — but we should absolutely see this lawsuit as a continuation of the same appalling, absurd caricature of justice that killed Aaron.

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#179

Post by Tor3 »

golem14 wrote: post #161
Tor3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One should think that this would enable anyone accused of a crime to argue "Your Honour, I could not know that my act was illegal as the law in question is unaccessible to me."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat

But when the 'ignorance' isn't because I didn't bother to learn about the word of the law, but (as in the case discussed) it's made unavailable. I can't learn it. What then?

Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online

#180

Post by fluffything »

baybal2 wrote: post #43
macspoofing wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. With Aaron Swartz there was no question of copyright infringement. He was infringing. With Carl Malamud and the state of Georgia there is ambiguity on the copyrightable status of certain kinds of legal materials (like descriptions and summaries of laws and legal decisions). This is what the courts for. Both sides have some basis for their position even though I side with Malamud on this point.

> Not quite. With Aaron Swartz there was no question of copyright infringement. He was infringing. He wasn't. He was 100% entitled to use his library access, and download every file he did download.

They weren't entitled to distribute them afterwards, which they did.

Or are you arguing that he was indeed entitled to distribute them afterwards? If so, can you walk us through the process of arriving at this conclusion?

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