A group of state legislators called the "Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee" is now threatening to sue some folks who have posted the full text of the Oregon Revised Statutes on the internet. Of all the things that the state would claim copyright in, they're now prohibiting people from publishing the law itself! ...
And guess who the co-chair of that committee is? Jeff Merkley!
This is what we get from the Democratic establishment in this state.
So no one has to go though the extended entry, here is the nut:
justia.com and public.resource.org post the entire oregon revised statutes on their site and got a cease and disist letter from the oregon legislative council committee, which is co-chaired by jeff merkley and peter courtney. however, Thomson West a large legal information services company has published an annotated copy of the ORS (which sells for $460) and the council committee has explicitly stated that they will not send a cease and desist letter his way. The cease and desist letter demands that either they remove the ORS from their sight, or pay a commercial licencing fee for the right to publish, which costs $30k for two years.
So basically, not ony is jeff merkley's legislative council committee going after websites that offer easy, open, free access to public documents and resources, but they are letting a commercial company get away scot free for doing the same thing.
By now you're probably wondering, "aren't laws public domain"? The answer is "yes", of course, they are, merkley's committee is not asserting copyrigt over the legal text itself; the key here is some very legal trickery, obviously laws must be public domain, but the lcc is asserting copyright over the added material, however, in the format that the statutes are available, the statutes are tied to the added material. From Carl Malamud of public.resource.org...
Oregon claims they are only asserting copyright on the added matter. However, they have glued the added matter so tightly on the underlying statutes that the private wrapper around the public package are inseparable. You can't get one without the other.
look, obviously i am a novick supporter, and as far as we know, this incedent is not based on a direct action of merkley (though he may have been involved in setting the agenda; which is to collect licencing fees from publishers), but open access to public documents is one of my key issues and merkley is probably the highest profile politician who is connected to this, so putting the spotlight on his role as co-chair of the committee might actual put pressure on someone to fix this. what "this" is, right, is an embarrassment to the state of oregon. since jeff merkley is co-chair of the committee it would behoove him to address the issue. why is oregon being the most aggressive state when it comes to controlling republishing of its statutes? shouldnt oregon be on the forefront of legal and government transparancey? If the problem is not the republishing of the laws, bt the republishing of the added material, why is it not possible to ge the laws without the added material?
The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.
We've sent Oregon back two letters. The first reviews the law and explains to the Legislative Counsel why their assertion of copyright over the state statutes is particularly weak, from both a common law perspective and from their own enabling legislation.
The position of the Legislative Counsel is that their public access obligations have been fulfilled by their web site. However, their web site has over 500,000 HTML errors, does not meet Section 508 accessibility requirements, has no metadata, as our second letter points out.
Particularly galling is the fact that Thomson West has also made a copy of these statutes and has done so without a commercial license, but the Legislative Counsel explicitly told Tim Stanley of Justia that they weren't going to send cease and desist letters to West. Evidently, it is much easier to pick on the little guys.
Oregon is not unique in asserting copyright over state law, but they are definitely one of the more aggressive in this kind of FUD campaign. Justia and Public.Resource.Org have decided this is an important issue to resolve and we're going to hold firm on this. Anybody else who is making a mirror of the Oregon law should drop me a line and let me know.
Oregon Claims State Laws Deserve Protection Against Piracy by Wendy Davis, Friday, Apr 18, 2008 7:00 AM ET It's not just movie studios and record companies that complain about online piracy. The state of Oregon is now griping that Web companies infringe its copyright by posting state laws online
Just last week, I was ruminating on the viability of state claims of copyright in government records. At the time, I was pretty confident that a state wouldn't be crazy enough to claim copyright in its own statutes, both because caselaw suggests this would be legally invalid and because it would be shoddy public policy. Now, the Legislative Counsel Committee of the State of Oregon has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Justia, a free online resource for judicial decisions and statutes, claiming that Justia's posting of the Oregon Revised Statutes violates its copyright. The Committee's claim is not as outlandish as it initially sounds, but it is still quite problematic.
The State of Oregon takes exception to Web sites that republish the state's Revised Statutes in full, claiming that the statutes contain copyrighted information in the republication causes the state to lose money it needs to continue putting out the official version of the statutes. Oregon's Legislative Counsel, Dexter Johnson, has therefore requested that legal information site Justia remove the information or (preferably) take out a paid license from the state.
locally, the only conerage i can find comes from the blog oregon legal research, which offers a very cautious wait-and-see defense of the legislative committe. if this were my web site, i might go ahead and post the statues myself to see what merkley and his committee have to say about it. ;)
RSS Feed: http://www.loadedorygun.net/rss/rss2.xml
