Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law | Hacker News Reader

Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law

official.resource.org

135 pointsdredmorbius61 comments

Until just a few years ago, the state of Georgia was suing this person for freely publishing the state's official code of laws.

Georgia had paid LexisNexis to annotate their laws and the annotated version became the authoritative copy. The state then asserted copyright over the annotations.

In 2020, SCOTUS decided 5-4 that legal annotations that are created by legislatures are ineligible for copyright.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_v._Public.Resource.Org....

I want to be shocked that 4 SC Justices thought that those annotations were copyrightable. How is this not obviously public data? Legislatures are on our payroll and work for the people.

If you have an hour to kill, it could be worth taking a look at the dissents in order to see their reasoning. The justices (/their clerks) are very good writers and decisions and dissents are pretty easy for a layperson to follow.

Most people don't have an hour to kill, and frequently use common sense to judge egregious violations of this kind.

> Most people don't have an hour to kill, and frequently use common sense to judge egregious violations

Most people aren’t lawyers or justices. This is specialisation of labor. If it doesn’t matter enough to spend a fraction of the time reading an option that took orders of magnitude more time to produce, the lazy opinion is a hunch, nothing more.

I read 2 of the 20 pages of the dissent and the dissent in Wikipedia. And guess what, the common sense judgement was correct.

Thomas dissent involved clerical, Kafkaesque beuracratic objections while fundamentally ignoring the right of a citizen to know the law. The very notion of selling the copyright for laws and judgements to a monopoly private party is ridiculous. The other objection is the grievance that a private party can't profit off annotations. Again, quite laughable. The court can simply pay a fee to any private party that helps with annotation. There is also a ridiculous idea in there that granting a monopoly will improve the quality of annotations (through the lack of competition?!!!!) This is high school level reasoning.

Yeah, the dissents were ridiculous and not worth the time I spent reading them.

Others are free to waste their time like I did, but would advise them not to. They should simply ignore the dissent as it is ridiculous. It can help in lowering the prestige of the Supreme court, but the abortion judgement based off "states rights" already took care of that. The Supreme court sounds like a political jerk fest at this point.

At this point, I suspect I have read more than everyone else in this thread. And it was a waste, except that it helped me question Thomas's sanity.

> I suspect I have read more than everyone else in this thread

You read two pages and a Wikipedia article. Come on.

Has anyone else read more than me - someone read all the 20 pages and all the precedents cited?!. Feel free to raise your hand. All of this detailed readings of ridiculous dissents reminds me of a joke.

A guy sees a pile of shit and steps aside and walks away.

Another guy comes along and says "Looks like shit, but can't say for sure"

Then he gets close to the shit on the sidewalk and smells it

"Smells like shit - can't be too sure though"

Then he licks it and tastes it "tastes like shit, can't be sure though"

He picks it up and takes it to a lab. The results come back - it is indeed shit.

He breathes a sigh of relief "It is shit! Thank God, I didn't step on it!"

> Has anyone else read more than me - someone read all the 20 pages and all the precedents cited?

“Stepping aside and walking away” is what most people do. You’ve taken the most cursory of looks at a complicated argument and declared as shit something with legal complexity obviously beyond your domain of expertise. Instead of curiosity you chose proud ignorance.

Like I said it smelled like shit and it is indeed shit. I don't plan on rolling around in it.

Do you have any specific objections to the summary I have stated, because honestly you haven't even read half as much as I did. Which is why the entirety of your argument is meta and content free and makes no reference to the actual dissent. You seem to be offended by ignorance, but between the 2 of us you are the one who is more ignorant and have offered no opinion on the dissent apart from hot takes about me.

The only thing you can learn from reading the dissent is that Thomas is ignorant as hell.

Or are you going for the angle that my opinion doesn't matter as long as I haven't earned a law clerkship at a prestigious place. And I should just keep on reading and reading for several years and not express an opinion on something as ridiculous as denying the residents and tax payers the ability to make a copy of the law.

I can't tell you how sick I'm getting of people bragging about what they haven't read.

A summary of the dissenting opinions is in the Wikipedia article linked above.

Many people get very upset and spend a lot of time complaining about the egregious laws that they have read about, without spending any time to actually read and understand the law in question.

These are often the same people who will rail against the patent system every time they see a patent with a broad title, completely ignoring that the patent is only for a very small improvement over the prior art.

While you are correct and it would be more accurate to call them 'impulsive reactions based on limited information' than 'common sense' - that doesn't make it a good thing. And in fact it's quite bad. Though Reddit has about 90% of their comments to thank for people doing that. They react based on the title of an article, without reading said article, nor the facts the article is based on - and other people arguing with them about their reaction.

Dissents begin on page 22 [1].

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

Majority: Roberts, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh

Dissent: Thomas, joined by Alito; Breyer (all but Part II–A and footnote 6)

Dissent: Ginsburg, joined by Breyer

---

For non-Americans, from most conservative to most liberal:

  Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, Ginsburg, Kagan, Breyer, Sotomoyor

Woof, if this would've happened in 2022 it would've probably gone the other way since Sotomoyer got replaced with a very conservative justice (Barret)

Sotomayor is still on the Court. Barrett replaced Ginsburg, who you’ll notice dissented here. Breyer was also replaced this year (with another liberal).

Copyright is one of those issues that is not necessarily clear‐cut between left and right, but more of an opinion specific to an individual justice. In this case, the majority and the dissents were each roughly evenly split between conservatives and liberals, not along (those) ideological lines.

It’s not so obvious. The annotations weren’t produced by the legislature and do not have the force of law. In a way they’re like any other law book that collects together public opinions and statutes with explanatory text, which are definitely copyrightable. The wrinkle in this case was that the legislature contracted with a private company to add the annotations:

> The Commission entered into a work-for-hire agreement with Matthew Bender & Co., Inc., a division of the LexisNexis Group, to prepare annotations

Allowing the private company to keep the copyright was basically a way for the legislature trying to get this work done on the cheap. After all if the legislature had told LexisNexis that the work would be public domain, it probably would have had to pay (or pay more) for LexisNexis to do the work.

This is typical. There’s myriad ways where the government can get some product or service for less money, or less money up front, by giving up some public right of privilege. The number of people who care about this sort of open government stuff is, unfortunately, pretty limited. I don’t think I know a single person outside HN who mentioned this case when it was pending or decided. And I work in Supreme Court practice! Also, this sort of thing is kinda Georgia’s MO. It attracts residents and businesses from Illinois and New York by having lower taxes. That often means cutting corners on things like this.

> The ... do not have the force of law

So you're saying this part

> the annotated version became the authoritative copy

is wrong?

Either way, you're describing a situation where the state cheaped out in a way that deprives its residents of their right to know what law governs them. I still call that obvious.

It’s not wrong, but I’m this context “authoritative” doesn’t mean the whole thing is “legally operative.”

Here is an example (reckless driving): https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2020/title-40/chapter-6...

The first part, subsections (a) and (b) is the actual law. That’s the only legally operative part that defines what reckless driving is. In most states, that is the only thing that is published.

The following sections are explanatory notes that don’t have the force of law and are not law. For example, it cross references relevant case law. In other states private companies will create these annotated versions of the legal code with these cross references, and those are definitely copyrightable.

They wouldn't include the commentary in their official copies if they didn't intend for it to affect how the law is interpreted. That makes "legislation" vs "explanatory notes" a meaningless distinction. It has a direct effect on the actions of people with guns and badges, therefore we the people have a right to know.

How does it work in the US? Do the different legislatures typically publish their own law books or is that typically up to private ventures to handle?

Here in Scandinavia it seems the governments and other legislative authorities publish laws and rules on their home pages and it is then up to the publishers to keep track of what to put in the law book. Or not, because there are too many laws so a selection has to be made as it won't fit in a single volume. Different publishers then have different selections and annotations.

Here in Germany new laws used to be published in print by the legislature. However recently they switched the authoritative copy to a digital online version.

For Malamud's similar case about building codes, the logical verdicts might be that privately-created text aimed at being building code does have copyright protection, but that it does not have the force of binding law until it has been put into the public domain by the government through agreement with the copyright holder. Getting a test case for this would be quite difficult though, as inspectors are notorious for exercising autocratic power and getting away with it.

It might also lead to the terrible situation where states just give up on building codes, but insurance companies continue to require them, creating de facto law through the backdoor of involuntary contracts.

In America it has become acceptable to reduced ever choice as between capitalism or burning it to the ground.

It has become encouraged. Both the government and the insurance companies would be happy for insurance to determine de facto law. Insurance companies would certainly take advantage of that power to help their bottom line, and government would tell insurance companies to dictate things that it couldn't pass or were even unconstitutional for government to have a say in.

> In a way they’re like any other law book that collects together public opinions and statutes with explanatory text, which are definitely copyrightable.

If they're commissioned by Georgia, it would make more sense for them to be bound to explicit terms that require their work to go into the public domain. Shame on Georgia for not demanding/negotiating it that way upfront. IMO if their work becomes the text that legislators ultimately consult when considering new legislation, that deliberation should be public. If LexisNexis can't do it under those terms and no one else bids, Georgia should fund the work themselves.

Though I think it would be really excellent for the federal government to fund commercial open source software projects to satisfy the needs of state and local governments. So many of them have such uniform operations that you could accomplish a great deal by optimizing for the majority case.

That would depend on the restrictions accompanying the money. The federal government has had mixed success funding technology projects. The Feds aren’t necessarily experts at solving state/local-level problems.

>>The annotations weren’t produced by the legislature and do not have the force of law

Well i believe they did, but it really comes down to if the annotations where needed to understand the law.

There are only 2 options here

1. The full public code including the annotations needed to understand the code is freely accessible to the public

2. Ignorance of the law becomes a valid defense

This is why the ruling by the court was the correct one

It’s like the difference between the ISO C++ specification and “the C++ Programming Language” book. The book will help you understand the specification, but the specification stands alone.

My understanding of the issue not like that at all, to extend your analogy it would be like if ISO published the Spec, but then every compiler used things only found in the C++ Programming Book to compile your programs, and any error codes were only found in the book

To bring it back to the Law, the official code was the Annotated Version which means that is what Judges, and Prosecutors would be referencing when looking at if you broke the law, what sentence you have, etc.

like how ISO publishes drafts for free, but charges for the final specification, so everyone just ends up implementing the most recent draft?

No. What dinged GA is that they incorporated the annotations into the law.

Other states contract West and Lexis to annotate, but those annotations aren’t incorporated.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was such a justice who thought prison was allowable for publishing the law.

What a hero!

It's worrisome that it was split 5-4 on the issue of copyright with something that was paid for with tax dollars.

It’s interesting to note that this decision did not come down along typical ideological lines either. The majority was three conservatives and two liberals, while the minority was two conservatives and two liberals.

I did a little side project where I tracked the partisan lean of each state over the years. I wanted to do a thing where I plot markers for every year where there was a major law passed that affected voting access in some way

I was SHOCKED how difficult it is to access public law in the majority of states. And even more shocked about how little academic research and resources there are about this particular study. I found it difficult to find studies that compared laws in multiple states in general. I assume the reason for this is mostly to do with lack of quality databases and resources for this.

Germany has gesetze-im-internet.de. All federal laws are there, in plain, linkable HTML. I link to this website all the time. They even have English translations of some parts.

The city of Berlin has their own version, although I find it unusable. It's slow, and hard to reliably link to.

gesetze-im-internet.de is operated by juris GmbH. They used to claim exclusive rights for their custom-made consolidated versions, and I believe they still claim something like that for historic versions available through their commercial subscription. (It so happens that juris also runs gesetze.berlin.de.) These juris versions are often viewed as authoritative, despite being made by a private company outside of the legislative process. There's another completely non-official website called buzer.de, which handles this so much better.

If you want to read the actual law as published, that's another commercial service (Bundesgesetzblatt, run by Bundesanzeiger Verlag), and there, the company claims protection rights as a database work. You are expected to buy a subscription if you want to print or search the PDF files they offer for viewing, or apparently for any kind of non-personal use. Unlike gesetze-im-internet.de and despite its commercial nature, Bundesgesetzblatt is an official federal publication.

Gesetzte im Internet is published by the ministry of Justice

According to https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/impressum.html is "just" providing the technical infrastructure(?).

There is also dejure which is 100%.

Am I missing something.

The commercial Bundesgesetzblatt is a scandal indeed

I don't think the BMJ or other parts of the feral government have in-sourced the editorial process. Historically, juris claimed copyright-like protection for the consolidated text, as can be seen here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060826035858/http://www.gesetz...

I think producing consolidated text is viewed by large parts of the legal community as “just typing”, similar to early attitudes towards programming, which is why few people care. Most of the controversy around juris is about access to court decisions.

What state doesn’t have their statutes online?

All states have their laws, regulations, and jurisprudence online like North Korea has freedom of speech. Technically yes, but effectively no.

What other topics are you horribly misinformed about?

http://alisondb.legislature.state.al.us/alison/codeofalabama...

https://www.akleg.gov/basis/statutes.asp

https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/ArkansasLaw

I think every municipality has them online as well.

How many words do any of those have? A simple word count. Like any word processor can provide circa 1980.

A bunch? How is word count relevant?

It’s a simple function that operates on the entire set of data, not just a sample.

You cannot do even a simple function on the entire set of data. Your examples are piecemeal samples, not the law.

You can’t do a simple word count of the law because you do not have access to the law.

Oh they have them online. Some in terrible pdfs or on sites that are randomly down with no warning. Rarely do you get good text search. God bless you if you're expecting some sort of API

The biggest surprise to me however was the lack of any well-organized effort to centralize all of these. To have them all in one API and make it easy to compare across states or get basic data around what gets passed when, who voted for what, etc. The latter information is sometimes not even available

The legal code seems like ever increasing software code, except there's no incentive to refactor or delete whole swaths of it. How do we create such an incentive? Less is more here too, perhaps more so because the legal code affects everyone's ability to avoid doing anything illegal and to hold elected legislators accountable.

Andrew Yang's auto-sunset laws concept does not seem so monumentally stupid now

It does. More things than not are better off to default to "an active law". Individual laws might benefit from auto-sunsets, but some of these already have sunsets, it's not a new concept. The general budget runs out, and relatively few things can continue to be paid out (including the national debt servicing!) automatically. But look at that shitshow every time the budget is getting close to expiring. I'm not sure having more of those shitshows every year is a good idea at all. Getting old and stupid laws off the books is indeed a noble cause, but not this way.

Legislatures are constantly attempting to refactor or delete whole swaths of it. That's why we have elections. Their incentive is the tax money they get to control.

I love this! They are suing the states, just so they can make law code publicly available. Saints.

The Fediverse thread provides critical context to the archive itself, which is available here:

<https://archive.org/details/govlaw?sort=-addeddate>

https://youtu.be/2tOJdGaMvVw

For those who wouldn't click otherwise, a quick description:

This is a video about `law.resource.org` and why they do the work they do. The most salient part of the video, for me, is the opening, where we hear from various citizens -- water inspectors, fire department chiefs, building inspectors -- who had to pay thousands or (at times) tens of thousands of dollars in order to get access to law codes that are directly relevant to their jobs.

Carl is legend. I was fortunate enough to see his speech at Aaron Swartz’ funeral service at the Internet Archive, which I believe is online somewhere.

He deserves your support! https://public.resource.org/about/donate.html

Even though there's only a few comments, I learned so much about state law and the way copyright is handled. And I must say, I'm deeply surprised. I would've never expected such a battle being waged in the background. It seems so backwards to put legislation behind a paywall.

I'm also curious as to why so many southern states have been doing this. Is it a relic from something in the past? Or maybe it's just a coincidence.

It surely stems from the racist past of the southern states. It's easy to keep "uppity" people (mostly black people, but also low class white people and other minorities) in check when you can arrest them and prevent them from exercising their rights because of laws they have no clue exist.

Legal note: the PTO's "PAIR" database continues terabytes of arguments about what claims are or are not allowable. I looked into loading this as text.

Unfortunately, it's all images. You'd have to OCR it. Until fairly recently, most practitioners and the PTO worked on paper.

It feels that discontinuance of electronic proceedings runs contrary to principle that law should be openly available and transparent. If not in the letter, then in the spirit.

Why nobody raised this with SCOTUS?

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