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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: 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.