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…
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."
Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online
161–170 of 186 posts
Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ide…
> Silly me. Yes, totally mistook title 25 for 5
Your citation was not to "title 25," either. This was not a numerical mistake. You cited the regulatory code, rather than the statutory code. They are entirely different bodies of law.
> the point that most of the official offences are not a matter of title 18 (criminal code) stands
Yes. Another point that still stands is that you fundamentally misunderstand how important it is not to over-criminalize behavior of this type.
The surest sign that a regime is corrupt is that it imprisons those it claims are corrupt. See, e.g., https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1679489/xi-jinping-v...
Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You’re starting from a premise that doesn’t really work. In a common law system, you can’t completely “understand” the law. You guess at what the law requires, the judge evaluates the law in the context of what you did, and renders judgment based on everything from other judges’ opinions to statistical studies to the judge’s moral sensibilities. For example, we are currently debating in the US whether our workplace discrimination law covers discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Erudite analysis has been written espousing both sides of that issue. Can you say you “understand” that law? Yet, people are expected to follow it.
The relevant distinction is between what sources are binding and what sources are not. The statutory text is binding. Case law in the same jurisdiction is binding. The annotations produced by a private company, or private scholarship published in a treatise, are not binding.
Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes the law will refer to a third party set of codes. For example, the law might say that it's illegal to operate a pressure vessel unless in satisfies all the requirements of ASME Section VIII Division 1 or 2. As you might guess, the ASME boiler and pressure vessel code is a copyrighted work owned by the ASME.
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.
Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online
#165Previous discussion on similar topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19617073
Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> Regulations written to implement acts of congress are considered "regulatory law"...
Correct.
> ...and can be litigated in criminal . . . court...
Overreaching. This rarely happens.
> ...litigated in . . . not civil court...
They certainly can be litigated in civil court. They almost always are.
> ...you can be arrested for violating them...
Extreme overstatement. This is almost never the case.
Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You’re starting from a premise that doesn’t really work. In a common law system, you can’t completely “understand” the law. You guess at what the law requires, the judge evaluates the law in the context of what you did, and renders judgment based on everything from other judges’ opinions to statistical studies to the judge’s moral sensibilities. For example, we are currently debating in the US whether our workplace d…
Thank you for explaining, that makes a lot of sense.
What's surprising is not that it's very hard to understand the law; it's big and messy and evolving.
What's surprising is that in practice one has to pay money to even try to understand what the experts are talking about. It's impossible to find all the relevant texts to study in a library, for example. That seems deeply undesirable; it exacerbates the problem you described of people being expected to follow the law when they can't possibly understand it.
Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online
#169The 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?
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.
Re: Sued for copyright infringement for putting legal materials online
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ide…
> Silly me. Yes, totally mistook title 25 for 5 Your citation was not to "title 25," either. This was not a numerical mistake. You cited the regulatory code, rather than the statutory code. They are entirely different bodies of law. > the point that most of the official offences are not a matter of title 18 (criminal code) stands Yes. Another point that still stands is that you fundamentally misunderstand how importa…
> Your citation was not to "title 25," either. This was not a numerical mistake. You cited the regulatory code, rather than the statutory code. They are entirely different bodies of law.
Well yes, I will not be a lawyer. After all finally remembered, ch 11 of title 18 (criminal code) is what was buzzing in my head at the time. Somehow "abuse of office" felt like it belonged there.
I concede on that, IANAL defence does not work when you engage in a dispute with a lawyer with encyclopedic knowledge of the code, and you totally embarrass yourself :)
> Yes. Another point that still stands is that you fundamentally misunderstand how important it is not to over-criminalize behavior of this type.
And you cite China as an example, out of all countries...
Lets follow this logic: a single stroke of a pen by a senior government officer of a big country can easily cause enough damage (economic, property, life, moral) for it to be comparable to a war loss. Just let the guy go? Last time I checked, generals loosing wars were usually relieved of heads, not jobs (even in USA, during the revolutionary era.)
The senior-most official positions must be coming with responsibility other than something like "suspension of no more than 14 days," and this is what a lot of nations subscribe to, and not all of them are communist satrapies.
In big part of Western Europe and former UK colonies Misfeasance in public office is at least a matter of an administrative liability with a lot of actionable laws against it.