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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 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.