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The State of Georgia in the US is suing the owner of the Public.Resource.org website for publishing the State of Georgia's own laws online.
According to the lawsuit [PDF] filed this week, Carl Malamud has "engaged in an 18 year long crusade to control the accessibility of U.S. government documents by becoming the United States’ Public Printer."
Although an alternative reading could be that he was simply publishing public laws on the internet.
At the center of the issue is not Georgia's basic legal code – that is made readily available online and off – but the annotated version of it. That annotated version is frequently used by the courts to make decisions of law, and as such Malamud decided it should also be made easily accessible online.
Georgia says that information is copyrighted, however, and it wants him to stop publishing it. Currently you can access the information through legal publisher Lexis Nexis, either by paying $378 for a printed copy or by going through an unusual series of online steps from Georgia's General Assembly website through to Lexis Nexis' relevant webpages (going direct to the relevant Lexis Nexis webpages will give you a blank page).
[...] However, the State of Georgia filing points to a little more animus than concerns over scanned documents. In particular it uses a quote of Malamud's from an article in 2009 in which he talked about committing "standards terrorism" to actually accuse Malamud of committing a form of terrorism. "Consistent with its strategy of terrorism, Defendant freely admits to the copying and distribution of massive numbers of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Annotations," reads the lawsuit in part.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 27 2015, @12:27PM
I don't believe (could be wrong) that any of the states publishes it's legal code for individuals to peruse. You can't go to the public library, and check a half dozen books. You can't go online to see specific codes related to traffic law, building codes, or much of anything else.
All of this stuff really should be made public - including those "annotated" versions.
Sometimes, having the book available can keep a guy out of trouble. I was stopped by a diesel cop in Houston one time, who claimed that my load wasn't properly secured. I whipped out the DOT book, opened it to the appropriate page, and showed him that my chains and straps actually exceeded the standards laid out in the book. He wanted to argue that my chains didn't have the proper load rating - so I showed him the metal tags still attached to the ends of the chains. The turkey was talking about a fine of more than a thousand dollars. If I hadn't had the book in the truck with me, he would have written the ticket, then I would have had to pay up, or make the trip back to Houston to go to court.
All laws and codes should be just as readily available as the DOT manuals for truck drivers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by wantkitteh on Monday July 27 2015, @12:33PM
I would have thought that preventing individuals from perusing the legal code under which they live could be considered an impediment to a huge variety of legal proceedings. Taking this situation and using it as a revenue source does nothing but reinforce the principle that the justice system is only for punishing the poor.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday July 27 2015, @05:13PM
Abuse of law to extract revenue from the public is extremely common. Red light cameras, speed traps, parking meter enforcement, automobile inspection, lawn care and grass height enforcement, and permits and inspections to run a restaurant or rent out a house, or even just own a pet, are a few. We need some rules, but these days there are far too many. Lobbying is an entire industry devoted to twisting the rules to disadvantage competitors and increase revenue for oneself, and they don't care whether any particular rule is in the public interest or not. Certainly lawn care equipment manufacturers and service providers want cities to get extreme about passing and enforcing ordinances about the quality of lawns, even going so far as to jail a homeowner, Rick Yoes, for not mowing often enough. Also arrested was a nice old lady, Sylvia Stayton, for feeding parking meters to help others out. She was inadvertently hurting the city's meter racket, and they couldn't have that!
This is why I never want to see police involvement in my business. Do NOT call the police unless it is a real emergency. Protecting and serving the public may not be the top item on their agenda. Call on them for trivial things, like noisy neighbors playing loud music, and you may have reason to regret it later. The neighbors will figure out that you're the local snitch whose been giving the police the excuses they need to impose fines, and your neighbors may decide they can play that game too. When the police get in that mode where they're fishing for reasons to impose fines, fairness and good sense is forgotten as the officers concentrate on escalating any trivial thing they find into big fines. They turn themselves into revenuers. Sometimes they're also interested in boosting their crime fighting statistics. If they can paint you as a law breaker, they can score some easy points by giving you a rough time. Too often, they also indulge in their prejudices. African Americans and other marginalized groups know all this very well.
Pushing back against this corruption is never ending work. I wonder if periodic revolutions are the only way to sweep away all the crufty, obsolete, and downright unfair and stupid rules.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Monday July 27 2015, @05:58PM
You may have missed my point here. I'm not suggesting this is an abuse of law, although it has elements of that, I'm saying it's an obfuscation of the law. Knowing what you're charged with is one thing, but if an annotated version of a document produced by your own governmental legislature is considered a commercial product, it's a direct conflict of interest for that legislature to put it's own income above the rights it's own citizens have to expect a fair trial. Or something, people keep talking around me and breaking my concentration on this, that may have not made any sense... :/
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday July 27 2015, @10:23PM
I got your point, and it's a damn good one.
How can I be found guilty of the law, when the government wishes to make it a crime to disseminate knowledge of the law, and through it's zeal to enforce that, creates financial barriers to my understanding of the law? This is so crazy stupid simple to understand. All laws must be PUBLISHED, AND DISSEMINATED FREELY, AND WITHOUT COSTS . Otherwise, the law effectively doesn't exist, and is impossible to be considered impartial to all citizens as the rich clearly have an advantage. The advantage would likewise exist for all "employees" that have incidental access to the law without costs.
I've been dealing with this for years too, as I've participated in more than a couple of screen scraping programs that exclusively go after and disseminate data collected by the government that should be free. I developed a production system that actually used TOR to scrape the government pages , and some other little tricks, to prevent their web servers from blocking me. About the only thing I did respect was that some government agencies asked for a reasonable ($50) yearly fee for provisioned FTP access to their systems. Where they didn't exist though, I maintain that I had the exact same rights as any citizen perusing the public pages.
It's like we actually need a Constitutional Amendment to remind these bastards in government that all of their information really does belong to us by default. BY DEFAULT.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by _NSAKEY on Monday July 27 2015, @06:45PM
You can find the laws for most states online. Here's a list I compiled: https://openrecords.guru/wiki/index.php?title=State_and_Federal_Laws [openrecords.guru] You'll notice that just about every state has their annotated laws online for free.
All citizens are expected to automatically know the law simply because it's on the books [washingtonpost.com], which means that Georgia's attempts to censor the free distribution of their own laws falls somewhere between "utter horse shit" and "These people need to be tarred and feathered out of public office." Each state has its own racket, and apparently forcing everyone to pay hundreds of dollars for access to the laws that they're supposed to know is one of Georgia's. Each state has something they charge way too much for that most other states give away for free, but this case happens to be more evil than most of the rest.
(Score: 2) by _NSAKEY on Monday July 27 2015, @06:54PM
Forgot to point out that a lot of those links to online law repositories in my first link point to the annotated versions. Not all of them are online, but there are enough that my point still stands.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @12:48PM
I know for a fact that the UN-annotated version is available online for most (all?)states; local law is also available easily in most cases. Apparently it is this annotated one that's the problem, similar to fancy bibles that have all kinds of annotations having a copyright and having to pay a substantial amount of money for them (not nearly as bad as college textbooks or this Lexus-Nexus BS, though).
(Score: 1) by acp_sn on Monday July 27 2015, @01:10PM
I'm surprised he didn't write you the ticket anyway because what the fuck are you going to to about it?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 27 2015, @01:27PM
A: Sometimes cops are honest people, who can make mistakes
B: I was going to court, is WTF I was going to do about it.
There are any number of videos on Youtube, in which citizens confront law enforcement officers. Sometimes, the cops are total jerks. Sometimes, the citizen is a total jerk. Often enough, both the cop and the citizen are honest people who simply have a difference of opinion. Such cops can be dissuaded from writing tickets and/or making arrests if presented with the proper facts, as opposed to opinions.
Whipping out the book to which he makes reference is one damned good way to defend yourself when the cop is wrong.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @01:51PM
You must be white I'm guessing?
NEVER argue with a cop. Never speak to a cop. Their job is to rack up potential charges to be used against you in court. PERIOD.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 27 2015, @03:42PM
Near enough to "white" as to make no difference. So, obviously, I'm not black. I simply refuse to be intimidated by anyone, anywhere. I'm a citizen, a veteran, a voter, and a taxpayer. I have the RIGHT to speak my mind. No government official is going to silence me, short of killing me. For all of government's evils regarding surveillance - government itself is coming under increasing surveillance. In other words, it's getting harder for a cop to kill someone just because he doesn't like what he has to say, or because he is the wrong color, or speaks the wrong language, or goes to the wrong church, or any number of other bullshit reasons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @02:15PM
If the cop gives you a ticket simply because you were supposedly acting like a jerk, or is more likely to, then the cop is abusing his/her power and shouldn't be a cop.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @02:49PM
Welcome to the real world dude.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @03:24PM
I live in the real world. You think I didn't notice that the problem exists?
(Score: 2) by Francis on Monday July 27 2015, @04:10PM
I'm sure that happens, but it's probably more common for people to talk the cop out of a warning and into a ticket by being rude. Cops have various motivations and while some of them are less than admirable, there isn't just one admirable motivation. Sometimes they just want to see that somebody respects the law enough to be more careful in the future and sometimes they just want people to be safe as a couple examples.
When people mouth off to a cop or refuse to accept lawful orders, they remove a lot of the lenient resolutions even before the cop makes a decision. The best policy is really to keep your mouth shut except to answer the questions that the cop asks and to do so briefly. And for God's sake, if they caught you doing something realize that they almost certainly will write a ticket and possibly take you in if you try to argue the point. You might get off with a warning if you admit that you did it, but they're not likely to write a warning if you lie about committing the infraction.
That's not legal advice, you can do as you wish, but realize that you're not going to make things better for yourself by lying and challenging the cops authority. They are humans and how you behave and how they think of you is going to influence how much leniency you get. Being lippy and making them work harder is probably not going to put them in a state of mind to be generous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:16AM
That's why you don't talk to cops.
They are humans and how you behave and how they think of you is going to influence how much leniency you get.
What happens sometimes is that they'll plant evidence of some crime if they don't like you. Drugs are convenient for that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @06:32PM
Maybe in 1975. That hasn't been true in a long time.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 27 2015, @08:52PM
No, I've known a few basically honest cops. Maybe not *completely* honest, but then I think that's covered under "people".
I wouldn't place any bets on them being a majority, or even a sizable fraction, but it only takes one white crow to make "some crows are white" a true statement.
Also, 1975 probably isn't nearly far enough back, or have you never heard the stories of corruption from the early 1900s, or even 1800s? And I imagine even the Romans had issues. Power corrupts, as the saying goes.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @02:34PM
Michigan publishes their law online.
https://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(zhdjbah1k4swikoyo01gj2gk))/mileg.aspx?page=home [mi.gov]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @03:09PM
The laws in this case are available. It is the 'notes' that were not.
What are the 'notes'? They are a set of court cases in which the particulars of the language are pulled apart and 'what does this exactly mean'.
I used to work with DOT laws. Specifically hours of service. The law itself is maybe 2 paragraphs long. The 'notes' are several BOOKS of stuff. This sort of stuff is usually hashed out over the years in the courts.
For example recently in my state it was argued all they way up to the supreme court about wither a dude should have been pulled over. The law specified that a 'lamp' not plural must work on the back of a car. But the cop pulled the guy because he had a busted tail light. But the 'notes' as it were and using other laws it basically meant 'lamps'. The supreme court basically said so.
So those 'notes' are just as much law as the law itself. As it is how the law is practiced.
(Score: 2) by Refugee from beyond on Monday July 27 2015, @04:56PM
Is that kind of nuts? %)
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday July 27 2015, @05:15PM
Yes, it's how precedent based law works though. One mistake can persist for a very long time because of it. Some aspects are good, and some are very bad.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday July 27 2015, @07:36PM
So if you mounted an extra tail light on your car and it burned out, you could be legally pulled over?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by Roger Murdock on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:13AM
You probably just need multiple lamps functioning, not necessarily all lamps functioning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @02:47PM
> All of this stuff really should be made public - including those "annotated" versions.
Malamud has been fighting that fight all over the US for over a decade now. He really is an unsung hero.
(Score: 2, Informative) by WillAdams on Monday July 27 2015, @02:50PM
The article submission specifically mentions that that the Georgia statutes are available online:
> At the center of the issue is not Georgia's basic legal code – that is made readily available online and off
Since you'd rather pretend that it's not available, here: http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/Default.asp [lexisnexis.com]
Pennsylvania's is available (and not from Lexis/Nexis): http://www.pacode.com/ [pacode.com]
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to look up the balance.
(Score: 3, Informative) by CoolHand on Monday July 27 2015, @02:51PM
Here is Indiana's [in.gov] state code all online. I've had opportunity to peruse it once or twice...
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 27 2015, @03:37PM
I looked at it and it didn't seem annotated.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by GlennC on Monday July 27 2015, @03:07PM
Five seconds with DuckDuckGo yielded the State of Ohio's Legal Code page at http://codes.ohio.gov/ [ohio.gov]
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 27 2015, @03:37PM
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday July 27 2015, @06:50PM
In Illinois, anyone can look up Illinois laws at the Gwendolyn Brooks Illinois State Library [mcgrewbooks.com] (link is to a story about its renaming) across the street from the Capitol. It's possible they're online as well, but I haven't looked.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by J053 on Monday July 27 2015, @11:33PM
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:46AM
What an interesting antidote to the "don't talk to cops" idiocy that crops up from time to time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:10AM
Washington
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/ [wa.gov]