Sunday, April 20, 2008
Meanwhile - in Oregon
I'm thinking, "only in America"...
At arstechnica.com, Nate Anderson tells us about it:
"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.
All citizens are legally presumed to know the law, so claiming copyright over it might seem like an odd position for a state to take; wouldn't massive copying be a goal rather than a problem? But in his letter to Justia, Johnson makes a more nuanced case. While the text of the law is not copyrighted, the "arrangement and subject-matter compilation of Oregon statutory law, the prefatory and explanatory notes, the leadlines and numbering for each statutory section, the tables, index and annotations and other such incidents" are under copyright."
