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Comment by amigoingtodie | Hacker News Reader

Because you have to pay to even read the state laws of Georgia, so nobody knows the law?

True. But how is that relevant? Nobody can read the law (the annotated copy), so nobody knows that wiping the servers is destroying evidence, and therefore illegal? I doubt that that's how this went down...

Wut?

The text of Georgias law is publicly available, but there is a version with annotations from legal precendents that is considered necessary to understand the law as it is currently interpreted. LexisNexis collates those annotations for the state of Georgia and maintains a copyright on the annotations, you cannot access them without paying. The government in Georgia feel this is perfectly acceptable as you can tehcnically access the law even though, in practice, you have no idea

The annotated version is freely available: http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/default.asp. What the kerfuffle is about is that the State of Georgia has (1) Georgia law is highly unusual in giving the annotations authoritative force; (2) the State of Georgia has asserted copyright over the annotated version.

It depends upon what you mean by "free." There are limitations on what you may do with the "freely" available version.

ah my mistake

They were referencing this:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-a...

False. You don't need to pay to read the laws, but you do need to pay if you want to read a private groups annotations to the laws, which include things like judicial rulings. The annotations are a value add and not required to understand or practice law in GA. You can also access the judicial rulings and all other sources which the annotations are derived from for free, but you would need to put the work in yourself to compile that data.

It's not quite that clear cut. Georgia places unusual weight to these specific annotations so simply having access to the rulings will not result in the same exact output.

Yes it’s very unusual. The official version is the annotated one, and the annotations have legal force.

Georgia is somewhat unique in that the annotations actually are part of the codified law. You absolutely do need the annotations to practice, because they are authoritative. So not "false" after all.

Supposedly the annotated version is actually the official Georgia code.

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