The concept is great, especially seeing the specific contributions legislators make (of course in this example all commits are coming from one guy, so not so useful here). I'd love to see this advance, as well as seeing more developments in semantic markup of laws (think: 'Siri, how do I get out of this ticket?'). Not to mention just better avenues for laypeople to educate themselves on the law. I find it a little ridiculous that the legal system, which pretty much runs our lives, is so complex that it requires an industry of some of the most highly paid people in our society to interact with it. The whole thing is ripe for hacking IMO.
Germany's laws on github, machine-readable and ready to be forked
21–30 of 78 posts
Re: Germany's laws on github, machine-readable and ready to be forked
#22What sucks is this would never happen in the US. The reason being that most of the earmarks and so forth are added to bills after they're passed. And not only that, they're added as images in tiny fonts so that they can't even be scanned in. God bless America.
Unfortunately I do not remember the link to the GPO page on xml or the XML page on thomas.loc.gov. However there are an awful lot of government documents in xml format. What specifically are you missing? For an interesting site that is using some of the new federal technology openess initiatives (for lack of a better term) take a look at: http://www.govtrack.us/ . Carl Malamud also has an extensive collection of machine readable government documents but sadly http://bulk.resource.org/ and http://public.resource.org/ seem to be down.
Resources:
Gov XML initiative: http://xml.gov/
House XML Initiative: http://xml.house.gov/
Code of Federal Regulations (XML format): http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/CFR e.g: CFR Chapter 12 (regulation of banks. 12cfr30 is customer information security at banks if you are interested) http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2012-title12-vol1/xml/CFR-2...
GovTracks About / Data Sources Page: http://www.govtrack.us/about
EDITED: To include links to the Code of Federal Regulations
Re: Germany's laws on github, machine-readable and ready to be forked
#23There was a great discussion on HN previously about this topic which also explains why a straight git implementation isn't viable for US law; I'm not sure if doing the same with Germany's laws would be similarly difficult: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3968653
Isn't US law not public-domain anyway? Or at least on a state by state basis? I remember a copyright issue concerning someone reprinting some of Oregon's laws.
That doesn't make any sense. How can laws not be in the public domain? Can any lawyers around comment?
Re: Germany's laws on github, machine-readable and ready to be forked
#24There was a great discussion on HN previously about this topic which also explains why a straight git implementation isn't viable for US law; I'm not sure if doing the same with Germany's laws would be similarly difficult: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3968653
Isn't US law not public-domain anyway? Or at least on a state by state basis? I remember a copyright issue concerning someone reprinting some of Oregon's laws.
The law is non-copyrightable. However a lot of state laws say "You will build your building according to Document X by Corporation Y" and that is copyrighted and not given out without a lot of money. The reason why these exist is that lawmakers aren't experts in, say, concrete; and those who are tend to be employed privately, and make industrial standards. As an example consider specifying that a program will be written in C (a bad idea here, but saying "structural members for buildings shall be steel as defined by this standard" isn't a terrible idea). C is defined by the relevant ANSI or ISO standard; now if you want to know what the law actually says, you have to pony up the money for an official standard.
I don't know what settled law is about this, but it is at the least morally questionable activity.
Re: Germany's laws on github, machine-readable and ready to be forked
#25Someone should come out with an artificial intelligence app, which reads through the laws and past history of cases and helps lawyers build cases. :-)
Re: Germany's laws on github, machine-readable and ready to be forked
#26I do not know about Germany, but in my country the issue is that "An update to the law X" may introduce changes not just to parts of X, but to govern the parts of laws Y, Z too. Or it may introduce completly new regulations not being a part of either law text. This is why it is hard to make current versions of X, Y or Z in terms of a version control. It is also common to have laws X and Y both applying in the same co…
Isn't that precisely taken into account by patches, hunks, and branches?
Re: Germany's laws on github, machine-readable and ready to be forked
#27What sucks is this would never happen in the US. The reason being that most of the earmarks and so forth are added to bills after they're passed. And not only that, they're added as images in tiny fonts so that they can't even be scanned in. God bless America.
No part of your comment is true.
Re: Germany's laws on github, machine-readable and ready to be forked
#28There was a great discussion on HN previously about this topic which also explains why a straight git implementation isn't viable for US law; I'm not sure if doing the same with Germany's laws would be similarly difficult: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3968653
Thanks for the link. I read the following from that earlier discussion and immediately thought, isn't this what the Darcs version control system was designed to do?
"What you have to do is to just record the conflict and create two parallel universes, one in which the conflict has been resolved using branch A and another one in which the conflict is resolved using branch B. You then keep these two universes alive and apply all the later changes twice. You have to do this until a judge or a legal body declares one of the "branches" the correct one; this may take years and the decision reverted (even partially) many times."
Re: Germany's laws on github, machine-readable and ready to be forked
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't US law not public-domain anyway? Or at least on a state by state basis? I remember a copyright issue concerning someone reprinting some of Oregon's laws.
The law is non-copyrightable. However a lot of state laws say "You will build your building according to Document X by Corporation Y" and that is copyrighted and not given out without a lot of money. The reason why these exist is that lawmakers aren't experts in, say, concrete; and those who are tend to be employed privately, and make industrial standards. As an example consider specifying that a program will be writ…
The law is fairly settled, however the Supremes have not said anything on the matter yet. The Veeck decision is the best answer as of now and Veeck seems to be pretty clear:
"The issue in this en banc case is the extent to which a private organization may assert copyright protection for its model codes, after the models have been adopted by a legislative body and become "the law". Specifically, may a code-writing organization prevent a website operator from posting the text of a model code where the code is identified simply as the building code of a city that enacted the model code as law? Our short answer is that as law, the model codes enter the public domain and are not subject to the copyright holder's exclusive prerogatives." (Veeck v. SOUTHERN BLDG. CODE CONGRESS INTERN., 293 F. 3d 791 - Court of Appeals, 5th Circuit 2002)[1]
You do not need to pony up the money if Carl Malamud already has a copy of the code. If you have purchased one of these codes and are done with the hardcopy get in touch with Malamud and see if he wants it.
Cory Doctorow explains Carl Malamud's efforts after the Veeck decision: http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/liberating-americas-secret....
May god continue to bless Mr. Malamud and all of the great work he has done...
[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6755260615473645...
Re: Germany's laws on github, machine-readable and ready to be forked
#30I do not know about Germany, but in my country the issue is that "An update to the law X" may introduce changes not just to parts of X, but to govern the parts of laws Y, Z too. Or it may introduce completly new regulations not being a part of either law text. This is why it is hard to make current versions of X, Y or Z in terms of a version control. It is also common to have laws X and Y both applying in the same co…
Isn't that precisely taken into account by patches, hunks, and branches?
The readme suggests that he only gets a copy of the final laws. That means he can diff two versions of a law, but more work would need to be done to say that a change to two different laws belongs in the same patch. Apparently that data is not machine readable.