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posted by takyon on Monday July 27 2015, @12:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the transparent-law dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 27 2015, @03:47PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 27 2015, @03:47PM (#214369) Journal

    Georgia alleges that Malamud is committing "standards terrorism" and that by posting the annotated laws online for free, he is trying to force Georgia to do the same. If Georgia wants to prevent 3rd parties from muddling the laws with outdated or edited versions, they can publish themselves.

    Resistance to the "standards terrorism" and lawsuits like these will just cause more people to mirror the content, adding to the hypothetical and unlikely problem they are facing. Nefarious edits of state legal code? People give and take bad legal advice to each other all the time online, without searching for an annotated legal code or even a forum of lawyers with a fat disclaimer. If the copies are legit and dated you can get an idea of how old they are.

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