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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 wantkitteh on Monday July 27 2015, @05:58PM

    by wantkitteh (3362) on Monday July 27 2015, @05:58PM (#214441) Homepage Journal

    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... :/

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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Monday July 27 2015, @10:23PM

    by edIII (791) on Monday July 27 2015, @10:23PM (#214572)

    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.