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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 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.