During a typical daily trolling of the website BoingBoing, I came across the following interesting nugget about the state where I grew up and attended high school:
“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.”
What you say? a government body copyrighting their laws and barring others from publishing them? Is this actually legal? Are Orgeon laws some sort of privately held intellectual property that turns some sort of profit?
Legal or not, it’s happened.
Being that copyright isn’t exactly part of the democratic system of government and that laws in Democracies such as U.S. states are generally thought to be, well, not “owned” by anyone exactly, but belonging to the people, I thought this was strange. However, as many strange things go, it turns out to be true. Both Justia and Public.Resource.Org have been served with cease and desist letters from the Oregon state government demanding that their laws be removed from public view on these websites.
Public.Resource.Org’s outlaw law compiler Carl Malamud wrote:
“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.”
It got me thinking about what the state can actually claim to own. Shouldn’t pretty much anything owned by the state be considered in the commons? If I take a picture of a state park in Oregon’s Columbia River gorge, am I violating the state’s rights by displaying the natural beauty of the state’s land without giving it compensation? If another state wants to enact one of Oregon’s more progressive laws, would they be barred from doing so? How does this effect other community-driven public information tools, like Wikidpedia?
I checked out the section of the Oregon State Legislature website where laws are, and as a web designer, I wasn’t too taken with it. Obviously, matters of personal taste are highly subjective. However, framed in one of the tasty pages here at drew3ooo, I think it’s a stunning work of art, and I prefer to be able to look up drinking ages and various age-of-consent prohibitions in the comfort of my own domain name. So, for all of you who don’t want to go slogging through the ugly, weirdly non-centered, image-heavy and non-web standards Oregon legislatures website to find out what it says about pumping your own gasoline or the the access people have to higher education awards while in internment camps, check out the Beaver state’s laws right here on d3.
My spanking new Oregon State Law page
Tags: copyright, law, OregonBrowse Timeline
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