Long way to go until what exactly?
Wasn't there recently an uproar in the U.S. about a [state/municipality/or some such] that gave copyright over to their [regulations/building codes/or some such] to a private entity? Thus, citizens had to pay to know what the law was and couldn't make copies.
This seems right along the lines of what op was talking about.
My memory is too fuzzy to get a good search result so if anyone could help out with the specifics I would appreciate it.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-a...
However, since court decisions about US law are based on prior rulings, the text itself is mostly useless and doesn't actually tell you what the whole law is. It's like an Ikea assembly manual without pictures.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-state-of-ge...
Malamud had worked with Aaron Swartz on opening up Pacer:
https://public.resource.org/crime/
And he was joined by the EFF defending against a suit by the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors Association after he published the details of a Federally-mandated safety standard:
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-prevail...
Much trickier is "incorporation by reference," which is when the official law or regulation says "as part of our building codes we're going to adopt the 2012 version of the International Building Code in its entirety, and then amend it as follows..." without actually including the text of the IBC (or the fire code, or whatever), which is a document created by a private entity, and is copyrighted. This happens all the time, across levels of government, and it pretty clearly poses a problem, but it's not really clear whose fault it is or what to do about it. Individual city governments don't have the requisite expertise to concoct an entire set of fire codes for themselves, and it's not clear you'd want them to: we arguably all benefit from having the greatest experts in the country craft the best possible code, and product makers that sell across markets benefit from having a uniform standard. But because professional associations end up taking on this role since no single government will, it's not clear how to pay for the work of researching and writing the code, so they end up self-funding by selling the text itself. It's not clear that either the governments or the organizations are in the wrong, even if the public ends up suffering.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-a...
The Official Code of Georgia is available online for free. However, the Official Code of Georgia Annotated is not. The law itself is not copyrighted, merely the annotations. The annotations are produced by private companies (Westlaw and LexisNexis), but are considered essential for legal research purposes. So although they are private written works subject to copyright, they possess something akin to but somewhat less than the power of law.
Most if not all of the major obstacles to full public access to case and statutory law arise from the LexisNexis/Westlaw duopoly over legal research. Courts historically have relied on the companies to collate and publish the reporters containing all the significant judicial opinions, rather than incurring the costs of typesetting and publishing the opinions themselves. They also publish annotated versions of the state and federal statutes and administrative regulations. The annotations make them copyrightable, but also provide added value to legal researchers. Lex/West then turn around and charge enormous sums of money for access to these reporters and annotated codes and to their searchable databases based on those. Many citizens are thus unable to access legal opinions which set common law precedents or statutory interpretations binding as law on those citizens.
Even where the opinions are published online for free by the court, e.g. Supreme Court opinions, lawyers rely heavily on the cross-citation services and topical annotations provided by Lex/West. Raw opinions and statutes just aren't that easy to use for research purposes without a fairly intense indexing system. So even though a lot of law is available for free online, it's hard to make full use of.
A few firms, like FastCase, are trying to produce relatively cheap/free alternatives to the traditional services, but it's extremely difficult to collate and annotate the massive volumes of judicial opinions, administrative decisions, rule makings, and statutes generated at the state and federal levels each year, never mind historically.
On the other hand, it's probably worth mentioning that the more significant a law is, the more likely you will have free access to it. Most inaccessible laws deal with small jurisdictions or narrow issues. Or they require a strong legal education to understand and apply. You may not be able to find an opinion issued by the California Board of Equalization in a 1973 tax dispute about what constitutes constitutionally sufficient notice of a propose adjustment to taxes owed, but the issue is so obscure and technical that access isn't really valuable to the general public anyway. The costs of providing access to that law are more efficiently allocated to the rare individuals who need it than to the general public. Those individuals pay their lawyers who pay West/Lex, who bear the costs of preserving and organizing these legal texts. Or so the argument more or less goes.
Really, this whole debate cuts to the core of the legal profession. Why should people have to pay a premium to ensure they are complying with the law or to resolve a dispute or to defend themselves against charges from the state? Which is really another way of asking, why is the law so complex that an elite caste of specialists is required to administer it?