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posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 12 2018, @04:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-dare-you-not-break-the-law dept.

Håkon Wium Lie of WWW fame has written on his blog about being sued for publishing public domain court decisions in Norway. Various volunteers have been publishing this material at rettspraksis.no, which is now down because of the copyright lawsuit against them even though both Norwegian laws and court decisions are exempted from copyright in Norway.

The basis for the lawsuit has been the copyright harmonization effort, Directive 96/9/EC from 1996, which asserts a 15-year copyright on databases and their contents. Not worried that Norway is outside the EU, the judge apparently considered the matter for less than 24 hours and without hearing counter arguments before deciding against rettspraksis.no, taking the site's contents offline, even material older than 15 years, and then slapping the volunteers with a large legal bill. An appeal is underway.

Via Boing Boing : Norwegian court orders volunteers to take down public domain court verdicts and pay copyright troll's legal bills.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @05:07PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @05:07PM (#692002)

    This is a case of stupid judge, not of stupid EU, several times over, as the friendly summary already notes.

    And even if it was an EU case, in an EU court, with data not specifically exempted, that legal case still woildn't hold any water and remain a case of stupid judge.

    (VLM I'm not even talking to you, you can't be cured. It just don't want to let your blatant bias stand without correction for other readers)

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday June 12 2018, @06:25PM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday June 12 2018, @06:25PM (#692043) Journal

    And even if it was an EU case, in an EU court, with data not specifically exempted, that legal case still woildn't hold any water and remain a case of stupid judge.

    Many instances of legal decision copyright claims have happened in the US as well.

    To do this correctly, you need to have a representative at each court to collect copies of the rulings, often on paper, these days more often digitally.

    But there are pitfalls here.

    Some courts contract with a Big-Law-Publishing for the collection and publishing of these things. Sometimes this includes the "free" copy made available to the court for distribution.

    Big-Law slips in mistakes, meaningless transcription errors, secret traceable numbers, etc, and makes it available via their own distribution channels, (and perhaps back to the court). Then they slip in a no-republish clause into their contract with the Courts, and nobody notices.

    Then Small-Law-Website, grabs one of these copies (or scrapes Big-Law's weband publishes it, and gets sued for copyright because the same hidden land-mines in the text.
    So without your own agent at the courthouse getting a copy directly from the proper office in the court house, you can easily get sued.

    A company I worked for was involved in such a venture, publishing decisions of a specific nature, for an entire state. Big-Law tried to come after us, and actually got the State's Attorney General to write us. Only when I pointed out we were getting the texts directly from a tape supplied by the court system itself (under public records law), and indexing it via our own software, did Mister AG (in the pocket of Big-Law) decide he didn't want to go up against the Judicial Branch, and we were left alone.

    There were several other small time publisher of these decisions and statutes, and we found out Big-Law had tried to same trick on them.

       

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @09:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @09:11PM (#692104)

      Based on the law in the books it shouldn't have qualified as an offense under that code, but thanks to a series of bad court decisions, none of which were publicly indexable at the time, they had broadened the law to act as a catch-all for offenses they didn't specifically document, instead of throwing it out as too vague. Result was a year long series of postponements before the case was thrown out.

      After realizing just how bad things had gotten I started avoiding any situation that could even remotely be considered questionable, even as I watched those writing the tickets perform even more grievous offenses on a daily basis.