Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
October 24, 2018 04:42 pm PDT

EFF scores a huge appeals court victory: the law cannot be copyrighted

For years we have chronicled the tireless fight of rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously) whose Public.Resource.org has devoted itself to publishing the world's laws, for free, where anyone can see and share them.

The principal that the law must be both readable and writable is as old as the idea of the rule of law itself, dating back to the Magna Carta and beyond. But in recent years, governments have begun to integrate commercially developed standards into their laws as their official safety code ("The plumbing code of East Dingleberry County shall be version xyz of the Unified Plumbing Standards Body's Master Code"), and thereafter, people who want to read the law -- to make sure they're obeying it, to investigate whether someone else has violated it -- has to pay (often thousands of dollars) to get a copy of their own laws.

Malamud's position is that once a standard is part of the law, it is no longer copyrightable and he can publish it. Despite the obvious justice of this position and its long precedent, he often finds himself on the receiving end of dire legal threats and even lawsuits. And when that happens, it's usually the Electronic Frontier Foundation that steps up to defend him.

Last week, Malamud and EFF scored a massive victory in this fight: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit struck down the state of Georgia's bid to suppress the publication of its laws, upholding Malamud's right to publish them. The appeals court's decision was unequivocal in its support for the position that the law is free for all to read and write -- and that Georgia's bid to make its laws pay-to-read was unconstitutional and illegitimate. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/z5rdQw2oeUE/free-to-read-write.html

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article