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Comment by MAGZine | Hacker News Reader

The supreme court recently upheld that people are legally allowed to know the laws that govern them without paying.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-1150_7m58.pdf

Only on hackernews would you read a comment saying that its fine for some corporation to hold the copyright on the law of the land.

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Thank you for that. I hadn't seen that case before. I sued the State here in Illinois a couple of years ago because I tried to FOIA some statutes and was rejected under the copyright exemption. The State even had their database admin come to testify that they paid thousands of dollars a month to LexisNexis. I cited all the previous district court and appellate rulings (from other circuits), but ultimately lost.

I thought you couldn't sue a state in its own courts. How did you manage to do it?

It’s the other way around - you can’t sue a state in another state’s court:

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/franchise-tax-bo...

> It’s the other way around - you can’t sue a state in another state’s court

Sovereign immunity means you can’t sue a state in its own courts, either, except in the ways it has agreed to be suable, which tend to be a small subset of those reasons for which any other party would be.

I think you're referring to sovereign immunity.

That doesn't apply to FOIA cases as the law gives a statutory right to sue.

I didn't say it's fine and in another comment I added that nobody disagrees that codes referenced by laws should be freely available, but the organizations making those codes do need to be compensated.

How happy would you be if you were an engineer who developed a set of equations around some dangerous piece of equipment and your consulting business was built around selling your expertise. Then the state government comes along and says "nice work, now it's the law".

I don't know how you get around the insurance backdoor that I mentioned. Any ideas?

Edit: Looking at the link you posted, that seems to be specifically about annotations to the law. How does it cover codes incorporated by reference? It might be right there and I'm not seeing it. I'm not used to reading these types of materials.

> How happy would you be if you were an engineer who developed a set of equations ... Then the state government comes along and says "nice work, now it's the law".

Personally, I'd be ecstatic if my work could have such a wide reaching impact as that

I get that, but surely you understand how others might be upset at effectively losing the copyright on their work.

You can’t copyright equations to begin with so this wouldn’t be an issue.

The organizations don’t write model code because they want to own the copyright they write model code so they, an unelected entity, can exercise an inordinate amount of power over legislation and draft regulations that further the business interests and line the pockets of their members.

Even without copyright protection the special interest groups will continue writing model code exactly as they were except that member corps might have to kick in a bit more money now that ordinary citizens won’t be subsidizing their efforts to manipulate the democratic process.

Simple, then don't have that work be part of enforceable code.

That was a very fact specific case that ruled that the GA legislature's copyright on the GA code was invalid. It's a stretch to expand that to something like the National Electrical Code or International Building Code since those copyrights are not owned by a legislature.

I'll have to read the opinion, but regulations are just as much part of the law as statues. If taxpayers have to foot the bill, so be it.

> regulations are just as much part of the law as statues.

The ruling does apply to regulations, it doesn't apply to material referenced in regulations (either directly or indirectly), which a whole lot of copyrighted things are.

(For an example of indirect reference, the HIPAA transactions and code sets rule regulations adopt CMS’s Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System as a standard code set for certain purposes. Great, as it's a federal government product, and therefore free from copyright burdens.

Except that the “Level 1 codes” in the HCPCS are defined by reference as the AMA’s Current Procedure Terminology codes, and the definition of that code set is under copyright and not freely available.

It's actually quite surprising to read such comment here.

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