Public.Resource.Org’s Fight
For Our Right to Bear Knowledge
Today’s blog reads like an antiquated story of inequality in our legal system, except this blog is not an old history lesson and rather news from the digital world of today, fresh off the presses. This is about Georgia suing Public.Resource.Org for copyright infringement after the website posted the Official Code of Georgia Annotated on its website.
The state took particular issue with not the code but the annotations. Claiming the annotations particularly are copywritten material. If you do not already know, annotations are the small sub-text commentaries that are listed below the actual laws and statutes.
All legal professionals doing legal research should be reading the annotations in their work. The annotations have all the good stuff. They tell you if the law is still good law, or further clarify its meaning or how the law should be applied. So, super important information.
West & Lexis Own Our Laws???
For me as a young legal professional, reading annotations was much more difficult to do. Just over a decade ago, the only way to access the laws in the U.S. was in book format, not online. You would have to purchase these books, and they were typically hundreds of dollars each.
Then the publishers of these law books would sell you an expensive updated supplement to the original book of laws that includes all of the updated annotations. These publications were mainly exclusively provided by two big private companies; Thompson Reuters and RELX Group, who own West and Lexis, respectively.
Arduous Annotations
So you would look up the original statute in one book and then you would search the annotations in another book that held the current supplement of annotations. This process was not just more time consuming than it is today, it was also much less accurate. I was extremely fortunate to work for Legal Aid of Nebraska in the Scottsbluff office where we had one of the largest legal libraries in the western part of the state.
Nonetheless, you could do your best research work with the most recent supplement and a change in the law could be so recent that the law you are relying on could actually be “bad law.” Which is why it was even more important for legal professionals to be following legislation at that time to truly be confident their research was thorough.
Kill, Marry, Kiss:
Support Staff, Case Law Software, Office Rent
Eventually, a couple of online databases were developed. I know this may surprise you but, they were also owned by the same two companies and continued to be very expensive. This expense was literally crippling to small firms and solo attorneys.
As often as billably possible, these expenses had to be passed down to the consumers of legal services in order for law firms to remain in business. Most solo attorneys felt like they had to choose between paying Westlaw or LexisNexis and paying an entry-level support person.
And Then A Hero Comes Along…
(I hope you sang that in your Mariah Carey voice.)
In 2007 Carl Malamud began scanning opinions and now just 12 years later the public access to the laws that run our country are almost all accessible online.
“Much of the CFR is hidden behind a cash register, a poll tax on access to justice.” Carl Malamud said seven years ago in his speech The Right to Bear Knowledge. Now his fight for our access to “the raw materials of our democracy” has hit another snare as it pertains to annotations.
When I read that the state of Georgia was fighting the free and digital dissemination of the laws we must abide by, I saw the suit as a blatant and intentional act to intimidate the civilian population from accessing our own laws; an intentional act to influence the policy of the government by intimidation and coercion to continue to privatize the dissemination of our laws and an overt attempt to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction of our equal access to justice. Literally the definition of domestic terrorism.
Who Are You Calling A Terrorist?
Some of you may be thinking, “Really? Terrorism? Geez, Val. Isn’t that taking it a little too far?” Well, Georgia was actually the first one to take it there. Paragraph 20 on page 12 of their Complaint literally states, “Consistent with its strategy of terrorism, Defendant freely admits to the copying and distribution of massive numbers of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Annotations on at least its https://yeswescan.org website.”
Malamud Ain’t Scared of You
(I hope you read that in your Bernie Mac voice and added a profanity.)
The court ruled against the state, although Malamud welcomes an appeal to determine once and for all who owns the law, and to share the following from a speech Malamud gave in 2011.
“If WestLaw can scan the opinions of our courts and the statutes of our legislatures to maximize shareholder value, why can’t the Judicial Conference of the United States and our nation’s law schools work together to maximize democratic values?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we launch the Library of Congress into cyberspace?
If billions of dollars can be spent to buy access to politicians, why can’t we spend billions of dollars to buy access to knowledge and justice, to promote the useful arts and commerce and science?
That is the challenge that we face, these are the kinds of bridges and reservoirs we can build, the kinds of public works projects that can become the foundation of a Digital Public Library of America, the opportunity we can realize, but only if we work together.”
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Valentina Zapata Harris
Mother | Advocate | Blogger