Laws, and their official (albeit non-binding) interpretations should not be under copyright. This has struck me as an absurd assertion from the very beginning: We're supposed to live in a nation of laws: how could that ever be the case if the laws themselves are kept from the people?
Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]
91–100 of 207 posts
Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it sounds like the court ignored precedent and effectively made up a new law out of whole cloth to reach this outcome. > We may be okay with this particular outcome, but would we feel the same way if they did it for say Roe v. Wade That's... pretty much exactly what they did for Roe v. Wade.
No, they didn't. In Roe v. Wade they made up a legal test which they can do, and they interpreted existing laws in terms of their constitutionality. However, as far as I can tell that's not what's happening here. They just took a law that applies to the judiciary and said "yah, that applies to the legislature too now". Again, not a lawyer, so the way in which they reached their outcome may not be as bad as it seems t…
I would not agree with your assessment. The legislature wrote the laws, which are not copyrighted. But they went a step further in this case to add that the ACTUAL law to be applied in the State is the Annotated version, not the original unannotated version. Or in other words, the only way to obtain the actual law is through the version that was copyrighted. (See the Ars Technica article that has some good background on the history of the case).
I still see the case as being about the legislature creating law but then assigning the copyright to that law to someone else. That was decided long ago in the government edicts precedents. Without this overturned decision, this leaves you in the position that you cannot access the Official Laws without being forced to go to the owner of the copyright for access.
Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]
#93Aside from the particulars of this case, I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking, as codified in the laws and time limits being inflated grossly to suit copyright holders in the current era. In my opinion, the argument that copyright extension incentivizes authors/creators doesn't hold much water. I generally observe that there are plenty of people willing to create a…
You make two arguments here, one about degree and the other about kind. As for kind, as others have pointed out, the intent of IP law is to create artificial scarcity. The marginal cost of information is 0, so you have to put turnstiles somewhere. Society has kind of blundered and stumbled into the mishmash of enforcement measures we have today, but the intent is to reward content creators.
If you accept this is a good thing, then the degree problem becomes one of proportionality. I agree that life + 70 years is exorbitant, but that particular formula is relatively easy to change legally. Practically, you have to fight powerful interests (Disney) to change it, but it can (and IMHO should) be done.
One interesting notion is to fully privatize the problem of artificial scarcity. This might look something like leasing a Disney device (for example) to watch Disney content. This seems like something of a nightmare, until you realize that you don't really need to watch movies.
Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]
#94It’s a welcome decision, but a very obvious one. Why did Georgia need to get told that we, the people, own the laws?
As a lawyer, I can chime in here. Annotated statutes are special. They have cross references to the cases which cite to the statutes. So if you're doing research on a statute, the annotated version will have the letter of the law word for word, then at the bottom it will have a little topical index (with topics based on a part of the statute) under each topic will be the cases citation which addressed that topic and…
Annotated statutes should only be special when created by others. A state's annotation carries significantly more weight: it bears an official status, and it should have been obvious that the state's official interpretation, though not completely binding, still constitutes critical information necessary for citizens to know and understand the laws they are expected to live by.
Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the absence of copyright, one supposes that authors would get large up-front fees for publishing, and that the fee for book 4, book 5 and so on for JK Rowling would have been quite large, so I suppose she would have done just fine. Think "Kickstarter, but for authors".
The exact opposite would happen. No publisher would pay very much for rights to a book that they cannot defend. Once that book hits the shelves, everyone with a printing press will be copying it and selling it at cost, which will undercut the first publisher because they need to include royalties in the price. They certainly aren't going to print a million copies if they aren't sure that they can sell them before som…
In this case, the "rights" would not be those of a book publisher but those of a patron/sponsor. Being among the persons or corporate entities who e.g. J.K. Rowling officially acknowledges as the "sponsors" of her work would create a lot of clout, and with that a lot of very real value. Authors used to be funded like that before the current copyright-based system became predominant; it's not just a theoretical model.
Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]
#96It’s a welcome decision, but a very obvious one. Why did Georgia need to get told that we, the people, own the laws?
As a lawyer, I can chime in here. Annotated statutes are special. They have cross references to the cases which cite to the statutes. So if you're doing research on a statute, the annotated version will have the letter of the law word for word, then at the bottom it will have a little topical index (with topics based on a part of the statute) under each topic will be the cases citation which addressed that topic and…
So why did Georgia feel the need to anoint this one the official annotated code?
There is obviously a market for annotations, what stopped LexisNexis from just doing the annotations on it's own initiative and selling the result itself?
What doomed their copyright is that they took state money to do it. Is it just corruption and they figured they can charge both sides?
Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The exact opposite would happen. No publisher would pay very much for rights to a book that they cannot defend. Once that book hits the shelves, everyone with a printing press will be copying it and selling it at cost, which will undercut the first publisher because they need to include royalties in the price. They certainly aren't going to print a million copies if they aren't sure that they can sell them before som…
In this case, the "rights" would not be those of a book publisher but those of a patron/sponsor . Being among the persons or corporate entities who e.g. J.K. Rowling officially acknowledges as the "sponsors" of her work would create a lot of clout, and with that a lot of very real value. Authors used to be funded like that before the current copyright-based system became predominant; it's not just a theoretical model…
I suppose she'd be able to sell "official copies" or something akin to that, but no matter what she's still not capturing as much of the value she created if she cannot assert a copyright. There's also nothing in copyright law precluding her from also getting sponsors. If anything, copyright law makes it clearer where everyone stands and so makes connecting writers and sponsors (or employers through a work-for-hire agreement) much easier.
Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]
#98Aside from the particulars of this case, I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking, as codified in the laws and time limits being inflated grossly to suit copyright holders in the current era. In my opinion, the argument that copyright extension incentivizes authors/creators doesn't hold much water. I generally observe that there are plenty of people willing to create a…
Maybe Congress should delegate the time of IP rights to the agencies, and then we can just worry about regulatory capture, but not the insurmountable nature of getting Congress to listen to the people instead of Corporate IP aggregators
Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case, the "rights" would not be those of a book publisher but those of a patron/sponsor . Being among the persons or corporate entities who e.g. J.K. Rowling officially acknowledges as the "sponsors" of her work would create a lot of clout, and with that a lot of very real value. Authors used to be funded like that before the current copyright-based system became predominant; it's not just a theoretical model…
I suppose she'd be able to sell "official copies" or something akin to that, but no matter what she's still not capturing as much of the value she created if she cannot assert a copyright. There's also nothing in copyright law precluding her from also getting sponsors. If anything, copyright law makes it clearer where everyone stands and so makes connecting writers and sponsors (or employers through a work-for-hire a…
> she's still not capturing as much of the value she created if she cannot assert a copyright
No one's disputing that. But she's also creating a lot more value at the same time. It's a wash.
Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US has not been harder but than Italy or Spain, or even Sweden. Sweden has had 2,300 COVID-19 deaths for 10 million people. The USA has 25 times as many deaths, but 32 times the population. Indeed, American cities with similar population and density to Stockholm have far fewer deaths. Washington DC is a little smaller and has similar density, but has had 165 deaths, versus over 1,100 in Stockholm. (Deaths are dou…
> The US has not been harder but than Italy or Spain, or even Sweden. You should check the facts. In the past few weeks New York alone reported more covid infections and deaths than Spain's total from the start of their outbreak, and New York has around 25% the population of Spain. New York also has between 2 to 3 times the number of active covid cases that Spain has, which indicates the death count will only get far…
These are the facts: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?utm_campaign=home.... The US has had a little over twice as may deaths as Spain, but has more than six times the population.
You’re the one who is cherry picking. 97.5% of America doesn’t live in NYC. What’s going on in NYC isn’t a proxy for the USA as a whole. If you want to talk about NYC, we can do that—we could compare to Barcelona or Madrid or something similar. NYC has suffered for some reasons very specific to it. (Due to its role as an international travel hub, it is estimated that up to 100 different people started chains of infection in NYC, versus less than 10 in California). But even including NYC, the USA as a whole hasn’t been as hard hit as Sweden, much less Spain.
And excluding NYC (where, again, 97.5% of Americans live), the USA has been even less hard hit. My state is about the size of Switzerland, and has had half as many deaths.