You could fix this issue by a federal law that says any law or regulation that isn't freely available is unenforceable.
Oh your building code is copyrighted and you have to pay to get a copy? Good news! Legally there is no building code.
Oh your building code is copyrighted and you have to pay to get a copy? Good news! Legally there is no building code.
However, the very scenario is covered generally by statute already. Regulations, even copyrighted ones adopted by an agency, must be publicly accessible to have the force of law. Freely accessible in most cases relate to having physical access to the text in some free way. This seems like something that can be solved very simply on the state level: just redefine publicly accessible to publicly accessible on the internet.
What the NFPA[1] does with its codes is to make them "available" through this horrible Java reader applet that prevents you from printing, selecting, copying and pasting or doing anything except looking at one page at a time. Oh, and half the time it's broken, or you have an incompatible version of Java or some other nonsense. It's a mess.
[1] National Fire Protection Association. They publish the National Electric Code (NEC) among others.
If a court require files be submitted in .docx mean that MS loses copyright on .docx file structure?
What's interesting is metadata: though court decisions themselves are not copyrightable, pagination and such (which is used by the courts to refer to other decisions) is. Disturbingly, when Malamud tried to publish Georgia's state laws he was accused of terrorism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...