Who owns the law in Georgia?; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 29, 2019

Bill Rankin, Atlanta Journal Constitution; Who owns the law in Georgia?

"“If the (appeals court’s) decision is affirmed, publishers will no longer be able to rely on sales of copyrighted works to recoup their costs for preparing annotations,” said Johnson, also a Washington attorney. “Therefore, states will either need to use taxpayer dollars to pay the publishers or stop offering annotated versions of their official codes.”

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia offered similar sentiments in a legal brief filed with the high court...

Malamud’s case has received support in friend-of-the-court briefs filed by a wide variety of groups, including the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Intellectual Property Association and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which was joined by Gannett Co., the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

“If the First Amendment requires public access to criminal trials so that citizens may oversee and participate in government, then citizens must also have access to the laws that organize their society (and that form the basis of those criminal trials),” the media organizations said.""

Should You Be Allowed to Copyright a Law? We're Going to Find Out; Gizmodo, December 4, 2019

Whitney Kimball, Gizmodo; Should You Be Allowed to Copyright a Law? We're Going to Find Out


"Copyright law, boring on its face, has posed various unprecedented threats to intellectual freedoms in recent internet history. It threatens to kill our links, kill our news, kill our memes, kill our precious videos of babies dancing to Prince. And yesterday, the Supreme Court considered the momentously stupid question: should you be able to paywall a law?"

Open Access: SCOTUS will consider whether publishers can copyright annotated state codes; ABA Journal, November 27, 2019

Mark Walsh, ABA Journal; Open Access: SCOTUS will consider whether publishers can copyright annotated state codes

"The question in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org Inc. is whether a work such as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated may not be copyrighted because it falls under the doctrine of “government edicts.” The doctrine stems from a series of 19th-century Supreme Court cases holding that judicial writings and other official legal works published under state authority are not “the proper subject of private copyright,” as an 1888 decision put it."

Judge: Annotations to Georgia Law Are Protected by Copyright; Associated Press via U.S. News & World Report, March 28, 2017

Kate Brumback, Associated Press via U.S. News & World Report; 

Judge: Annotations to Georgia Law Are Protected by Copyright

"A federal judge has ruled that annotations to Georgia's legal code can be copyrighted and that a nonprofit organization's copying and distribution of them isn't protected by fair use laws.

The state in July 2015 sued Public.Resource.Org Inc. in federal court in Atlanta. The nonprofit is run by Carl Malamud, an internet public domain advocate who argues for free access to legally obtained files."

State Of Georgia Sues Carl Malamud For Copyright Infringement For Publishing The State's Own Laws; TechDirt.com, 7/24/15

Mike Masnick, TechDirt.com; State Of Georgia Sues Carl Malamud For Copyright Infringement For Publishing The State's Own Laws:

"Two years ago, we wrote about the state of Georgia ridiculously threatening to sue Carl Malamud and his site Public.Resource.org for copyright infringement... for publishing an official annotated copy of the state's laws. This followed on a similar threat from the state of Oregon, which wisely backed down. Malamud has spent the last few years of his life doing wonderful and important work trying to make sure that the laws that we live by are actually available to the public. The specific issue here is that while the basic Georgia legal code is available to the public, the state charges a lot of money for the "Official Code of Georgia Annotated." The distinction here is fairly important -- but it's worth noting that the courts will regularly rely on the annotations in the official code, which more or less makes them a part of the law itself. And then, the question is whether or not the law itself should be subject to copyright restrictions. Malamud has long argued no, while the state has obviously argued yes, probably blinded by the revenue from selling its official copy of the annotated code."

It took two years, but the state has now done the absolutely ridiculous thing of suing Malamud. It is about as ridiculous as you would expect again focusing on the highly questionable claim that the Official Code of Georgia Annotated is covered by federal copyright law -- and that not only was Malamud (*gasp*) distributing it, but also... creating derivative works! Oh no! And, he's such an evil person that he was encouraging others to do so as well!"

The Lost Emails of the I.R.S. Point to a Wider Problem; New York Times, 6/30/14

Derek Willis, New York Times; The Lost Emails of the I.R.S. Point to a Wider Problem:

"Even requiring agencies to store emails as electronic records rather than on paper might not solve the federal government’s problems with record management. Carl Malamud, the founder and president of the nonprofit Public.Resource.Org, which places state and federal government information in the public domain, described a deeper problem: Despite spending billions on information technology, the federal government has not kept pace with advances in technology. It has developed a defensive posture when the public and Congress demand information.

“In my view, one reason people dump so much on the Civil Service is that the Civil Service is forced to work with the most God-awful tools known to modern organizations,” Mr. Malamud said. “We spent $80 billion a year on I.T., and I’ve heard that 75 percent of that is a total waste, the end result being that we paralyze the bureaucracy and they in turn develop a real attitude.”

Mr. Malamud’s own experience with the I.R.S. includes performing audits on publicly available information to ensure that taxpayer data such as Social Security numbers do not get released by the agency. (He found tens of thousands of examples in one I.R.S.-managed database last year). The problem, he said, “is a people problem, not a money problem.”

A 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, agreed. “Technology alone cannot solve the problem without commitment from agencies,” it concluded. Insufficient training and senior officials who did not follow established procedures were among the concerns that the G.A.O. cited, calling email management “especially problematic.”"

Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive; New York Times, 3/14/10

Brian Stelter, New York Times; Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive:

"Dust off a disc. Maybe it’s video of a Bob Hope Christmas show, or maybe it’s the Apollo 11 moon landing. Insert a blank disc. Duplicate.

Carl Malamud, who conceived the project, calls it an “experiment in crowd-sourced digitization.”

It sounds monotonous because it is. But every time Liz Pruszko presses the start button on a DVD machine, she knows she is helping to unlock the thousands of videos tucked away in the National Archives.

“It just seems like such a shame to not have this content out there,” Ms. Pruszko said.

When she says “out there,” she is talking about the Web, where it might seem that every conceivable video clip of federal importance is already stored, just waiting to be searched for. That is far from true. But she is nudging the government in that direction.

Ms. Pruszko is a volunteer for the International Amateur Scanning League, an invention of the longtime public information advocate Carl Malamud. The league plans to upload the archives’ collection of 3,000 DVDs in what Mr. Malamud calls an “experiment in crowd-sourced digitization.”

Armed with nothing but a DVD duplicator and a YouTube account, the volunteers have copied and uploaded, among other video clips, an address by John F. Kennedy; a silent film about the Communist “red scare”; a training video on farming; and a Disney film for World War II soldiers about how to avoid malaria, in Spanish. So far, nothing elusive has emerged — but the project is in its infancy.

“It’s a cornucopia of information,” said Justin Grimes, another league volunteer.

The league is a small demonstration that volunteers can sometimes achieve what bureaucracies can’t or won’t. The government’s 10-year broadband plan, to be submitted to Congress this week, will include a vision for Video.gov, a proposed home for video from federal agencies. The proposal is sure to be cheered by people who want the government to put more materials online. But Mr. Malamud and his volunteers are not waiting.

Mr. Malamud, who spends most of his time pushing for broader access to legal documents online, had already uploaded 1,300 videos from other government sources, like the Federal Aviation Administration and National Technical Information Service. But “the motherlode is the archives,” he said.

To put those DVDs online, he needed volunteers, and he found them at CopyNight, a monthly gathering of copyright law enthusiasts that he visited at a restaurant near Union Station last December. (CopyNight members are generally supportive of relaxations to copyright laws.) Mr. Malamud raised the idea a month later.

Though it may seem to be an odd pursuit, especially for no pay, Ms. Pruszko, who is a project manager for a Web development company, took to the idea. Ms. Pruszko said she explained to her fiancé that “copying DVDs sounds boring, but it’s not the copying that counts — it’s what it represents and what it results in.” What it represents, she said, is access to information, a cornerstone of democracy.

Although the DVDs are all technically available to the public, they are hard to see unless a person visits the archive or pays for a copy via Amazon.com. With the scanning project, they are a few mouse clicks away.

Ms. Pruszko started doing the copying last month, and returned to the archives building last Saturday to copy her 50th DVD.

At No. 50, “Carl promised me a poster,” she joked.

There are also laminated badges and “Public Domain Merit Badges,” all meant to convey a seriousness of purpose along with a sense of humor.

In red envelopes labeled “FedFlix,” his DVD-by-mail variation on Netflix, the volunteers mail the DVD copies to Mr. Malamud’s home in Northern California, where he uploads them to YouTube, the Internet Archive Web site and an independent server. Mr. Malamud said that the volunteer work hardly reduces the need for the government to increase its own digitization efforts.

“I try to get the government to change by showing them what’s possible,” he said.

David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, said the archives were fully supportive of what the citizen group was doing.

“My goal is to make available electronically as much content as possible,” he said, adding that the FedFlix copies are sufficiently high-quality that the archives would not have to duplicate them once more.

The scanning league is starting with the 3,000 or so DVDs in the collection, because they are the easiest to duplicate. But there is much more to be done: the archives are said to house more than 200,000 videos.

“Knowing Carl, he has other things planned,” Ms. Pruszko said."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/technology/15fedflix.html?hpw

Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records for Free, Wired.com, 12/12/08

Via Wired.com, Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records for Free:

"[Carl] Malamud is a man accustomed to finding ways to provide free and easy online access to government documents...

He's since won battles freeing the nation's catalog of copyrights, Oregon's book of state laws, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark database. Now, he's after congressional-hearing videos, expensive but copyright-free building codes, and the Code of Federal Regulations, in addition to all the court filings in the PACER database."

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/12/open_pacer