After Malamud uploaded annotated Georgia law to his website they initiated an all out legal attack on him. Even going as far as to insinuate that he is a terrorist, the state of Georgia sure doesn’t seem to be happy with him educating the public. According to The Register:
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).
Malamud argues that the law should not be subject to any form of copyright provisions and has previously put forward a legal argument that presumably he will offer in response to the lawsuit.
“It is a long-held tenet of American law that there is no copyright in the law. This is because the law belongs to the people and in our system of democracy we have the right to read, know, and speak the laws by which we choose to govern ourselves. Requiring a license before allowing citizens to read or speak the law would be a violation of deeply-held principles in our system that the laws apply equally to all.”
He then quotes some supreme court decisions in support of his view.
What do you think? Are copyrights on government legislation legitimate, or was Malamud well within his rights when he decided to educate the public on its very own laws?
Source: The Register
Public domain.
If ignorance is no excuse..then why do police use it in their favor?
It is for police officers ! No kidding they are the exception to that rule ! Ignorance of the law is no defence for the rest of us !
All I hear is “Dueling Banjos”
Laws only apply to average citizens not politicians and the like and the average person breaks a new law everyday having no idea they committed an offense, fact!
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Sorry it doesn’t work that way we get to see them this is America
They have to make all laws public knowledge period if they don’t then you have the right to plead no contest to any charges they with held from the public
Really?