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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @02:17PM
I was under the impression that the work of a state itself is automatically within the public domain. In the lawsuit, Georgia claims it had the work done as a work for hire. (Hence, I suppose, why LexisNexis isn't suing directly.) And, ironically, the state is now crying that if this is allowed to stand then the state will have to pay for the work... WTF? But I do hope the state is flattened by this. Let them pay for it and let LexisNexis retain copyright then.... Then LexisNexis would have a case for infringement.