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Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer
Attorney James Grimmelmann has put together a detailed history of issues surrounding access to the law as a way of looking at the state of Oregon's attempts to assert copyright privileges on its legal code. He concludes with a set of principles for access to legal code which has a lot of similarities with our principles regarding source code. "The right to distribute: Once primary legal information is online, anyone should be able to pick it up and republish it as they see fit. That could be coordinated with other materials in larger collections, it could be pushed out to mobile devices, it could be reformatted or sliced and diced in some clever new way."
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Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer Posted Jun 20, 2008 22:29 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Just a clarification that makes this a little less outrageous: Oregon makes its legislative acts freely available and copyable. The material in question is a version of the law that the state compiles into a usable form. It sells copies of that compilation to lawyers to cover the cost of creating it. Obviously, if Oregon can't control copying of that material, it has to pay for creating it some other way, so the question is whether the people of Oregon care to pay taxes to improve other people's access to the law.
Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer Posted Jun 21, 2008 15:08 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] Would anyone buy that in the open source world? I mean, yes, you can have copies of any source file in our new Linux kernel if you just come to our offices and copy it off, but if you want the whole thing ready to compile, you're going to have to pay us big bucks. Of course this isn't as unimportant as mere software; this is the law that can dictate life and death for us.
Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer Posted Jun 21, 2008 16:51 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Would anyone buy that in the open source world? I mean, yes, you can have copies of any source file in our new Linux kernel if you just come to our offices and copy it off, but if you want the whole thing ready to compile, you're going to have to pay us big bucks. That's not how it works with Oregon law. What Oregon offers for free isn't a version of the law that is designed to be useless; it just offers you what it has without spending a bunch more money. Which is exactly what OSDL does with the Linux kernel. Even GPL doesn't seek to make publishers distribute, for free, more usable code than what they already have.
Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer Posted Jun 21, 2008 19:28 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (As a sidenote, apparently the issue is over; Oregon voted to remove these copyright restrictions.) You yourself said that "The material in question is a version of the law that the state compiles into a usable form." OSDL actually offers a form of Linux (spend a lot of money to do so) that has been compiled into a usable form. In the analogy, the company was only offering the form that it has for free; the one that doesn't have half a dozen parts compiled by hand (as opposed to a Makefile) is the one that costs.
Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer Posted Jun 21, 2008 20:31 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] OSDL actually offers a form of Linux (spend a lot of money to do so) that has been compiled into a usable form. But OSDL does not have another, less costly version sitting around that it might conceivably offer for free. So it is not in the same position as the state of Oregon and your hypothetical case of OSDL doing what Oregon was doing is not analogous. But to answer your original question, as to whether the open source community would "buy" a dual distribution scheme from OSDL where it distributes a largely useless version under GPL and a useful version under a proprietary license, I believe the the community would buy that the useless distribution is open source. I don't think the open source community is about demanding that people give away any code they have. It's about distributing code a certain way when you do it (e.g. if you give object code, give source too) and about properly identifying open source code. Looked at that way, OSDL is a bad example, because of the fact that OSDL doesn't have an object code distribution. But consider the company that builds object code by typing individual compile commands, and distributes the source, without make files, under GPL. I believe the open source community would buy that as open source. Even if the company also developed a make file package and sells that separately with no copying allowed.
Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer Posted Jun 21, 2008 20:48 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] The GPL makes publishers distribute the actual code used to make the program, not some theoretical proto-code. The actual "code" that is used in Oregon by the judges and lawyers is not the raw statues; it's that volume that Oregon sought to limit the distribution of. The annotation may be comments in some sense, but as the law is interpreted by humans, those "comments" will be part of what actually gets run, and the GPL doesn't permit the stripping of comments, either.
Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer Posted Jun 22, 2008 2:19 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] If I understand the analogy you're trying to draw now, you're saying the law is some abstract thing that actually gets applied to people's lives and is analogous to object code that you run on your computer, and the ORS is the source code for these legal applications because the people who apply the law use that for reference.That takes a lot of imagination, but OK. In that case, Oregon law was not open source, in spite of the fact that the state published the raw statutes for free. Of course, once you head down that path, you have a bigger problem: The appliers of law use lots of other source code that the state doesn't even own the copyright for: journal articles, privately published reporters, text books, etc. So there's no way they can make it open source. I wonder what the rest of Oregon's decision about not enforcing its copyright was. Are they going to let ORS die (I doubt they can sell enough copies now to pay for it) or did they appropriate some tax money to keep the code reviser's office open?
Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer Posted Jun 22, 2008 13:59 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] Is Oregon going to stop publishing an essential tool that is standard among the states because an experimental revenue stream dried up, if indeed it ever worked at all? I doubt it.
Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer Posted Jun 22, 2008 16:58 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] In neither case would the code disappear.It would be entirely reasonable for Oregon to get out of the revised code business. Many states have never been in it, and the law works fine there. In those states, private companies do that legal analysis and pay for it via enforcement of copyright. I don't know, but I'd guess the code costs less in those states than in the ones where the government does the work. Even in Oregon, there's a lot more legal reference material compiled by private companies (and relied upon by those subject to the law and those applying it) than what is produced by the state. There's an ancient controversy over just how far the public should go in providing legal help to each other. Some think the state should provide to everyone at public expense not just revised statutes, but skilled lawyers to interpret them.
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