by losiek
Testifying for the public domain:
[Via Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech]
Tomorrow I will be headed down to Salem with many others to testify in front of the Legislative Council Committee. A friend working hard on this issue, Pete Forsyth, has a great explanation on the current situation:
The topic: whether or not the laws that we, the people of Oregon write are in the public domain, or whether the State can prevent their republication by insisting on licensing arrangements.
You can read the rest of his post here.
This all came about a few months ago when a website that publishes state laws free of charge (not even any advertising) in a standard format was issued a take down notice from the LCC, citing a law that gives them authority to decide ownership of various works of the state government, and local governments within the state, including the Revised Statutes. A California-based nonprofit (Public Resource) is leading the advocacy counter and will be at the hearing tomorrow.
You can read the paper trail or declaratory statements on Public Resource’s site
You can read my written testimonyIf you are an Oregonian and want to weigh in, feel free to contact members of the Committee with your thoughts, or leave comments here for me to relay tomorrow.
Thanks!
Yes, in many cases the actually legal language many of our laws are in, the laws passed by our employees, has been given to a private organization who makes us pay to read our own laws!
This does not make any real sense today when this information can so easily be put online. It reminds me of the delegation of copyright forced onto most scientific authors. Why are we allowing our government to do the same sort of delegation, making it very expensive for the citizens whose lives the laws affect to access the laws.
Technorati Tags: Open Access
June 26, 2008 at 8:56 am
As a little, old, lady, Republican, I cannot tell you how appalled I am at the idea of legislatures hiding the numbers on the laws—or whatever they think they are doing. Oregon is strange enough (full service gas stations, for example) without hiding the number of the Statute you are being arrested under!
June 26, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Well, many states allow private companies to publish the full legl descriptions of legislation and then sell these. Normally, it was only law firms that bought books but with the Internet, a much wider group of people want access that is being constrined by these companies.
It will be interesting to see how it pans out.
June 26, 2008 at 11:18 pm
This panned out pretty well, actually! After the testimony of a couple of national organizations and several of us Oregonians, the Legislative Counsel Committee voted unanimously to disavow its copyright claim over the Oregon Revised Statutes.
We wrote it up on the WikiProject Oregon blog. Thanks for your interest — and, has anybody ever told you your WordPress looks like Drupal??! ;)
June 26, 2008 at 11:34 pm
That is really good news to hear. Nice that sometimes they listen.
And, yep, this is one of WordPress.com’s themes and it does looks a lot like Drupal. Apparently there is some history about how it ended up looking so much like Drupal but I think things have settled down now.
I really like the color picker which lets me make rapid changes in the color background. So I can make it red for Christmas. Things like that.