Yes, what laws exist should be made available in as many formats as possible, including some easily accessible electronic format. I doubt that anybody here would disagree with that.
But the real issue here is that there are so many laws and regulations that it becomes impossible for any one human being to know all of them. Any person who goes about their day in a normal fashion breaks multiple laws every day.
When the state starts policing moral and ethical behavior rather than merely defending people against aggression, you come up with page after page of laws and it becomes impossible to know what is correct. This culture of "every problem needs a law to solve it" is in my opinion the priority here, not merely making thousands of pages of useless laws somehow more accessible. You're never going to read them anyway.
Saying "we have too many laws--nobody can know them all at once" is like saying "Linux has too many lines of code--nobody can understand it all at once." The complexity is unavoidable. You can shift it around, but you can't get rid of it.
Furthermore, it is probably possible for most reasonable people in such a society to know what fields of human endeavor are regulated under the law and to look up and understand the applicable regulations. Of course, some fields and their associated regulations are very technical, but it seems to be a reasonable goal that anyone with enough expertise to work in such a field, even as an amateur can also understand the associated laws.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we take that as true... the fact that something hasn't been done yet does not necessarily prove that it's impossible. If everyone simply accepted the status quo as inevitable, we would never make any progress at all.
I had thought Hacker News was smart enough to avoid letting even the most intelligent, well articulated thread derailment to get to the top of its pages.
I've heard this assertion so many times, and after thinking about it, I don't think it's actually true. I agree with the sentiment of your comment, but I don't think I'm actually breaking multiple laws every day. Feel free to prove me wrong.
Edit: Could anyone at least provide me with an example of some laws that many people, and perhaps I, break every day unknowingly? That would be a start.
Not stopping completely at a stop sign.
Sharing a cat photo you found online. Doubly so if you rehosted it (imgur, Instagram, etc). Sharing stuff on the internet, even without shades of piracy, is fraught with copyright problems.
Speeding. I'd be very surprised if you drove at or below the speed limit all the time, every day.
Not speeding - there are minimum speed statutes in some jurisdictions.
Not in the US, but in other jurisdictions like Japan and France, taking a random picture on the street where someone is identifiable.
The list goes on, and on, and on...
According to Texas Criminal and Traffic Law section 101.31, possession of more than one quart of liquor or more than 24 12-ounce beers in a dry area is evidence of intent to sell alcohol.
I've lived in two dry cities in TX, BTW.
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Innocent-ebook/dp/B...
Do you have specific knowledge of someone possessing controlled substances in a jurisdiction or situation where they're forbidden (e.g., someone in a medical marijuana state who possesses even misdemeanor amounts of pot but doesn't have official medical sanction for its use, or anyone possessing any amount in a "dry" state)? Obstruction of justice.
Have you ever taken a "mental health day" and called in sick when you aren't actually sick? You've defrauded your employer.
These are all acts specifically described as illegal by the relevant statute.
EDIT: clarifying language on "exceeding authorized access" case.
Perhaps we should focus on writing laws that protect people and allow common sense back into our court rooms? These "protecting" laws would primarily used by appellate courts to throw out "bad" convictions (i.e. ones where race or social class likely were used as motive to convict someone, thus preventing legal injustices such as were committed during the Jim Crow era).
Our society is extremely complex. There are many many industries and activities that need to be individually regulated. Let's take a few examples of very specific, arcane laws that are important for everyday people who might not even know about them.
1. Suppose you buy a home, and in the bathroom, there is an exhaust fan. You use that fan for years, and one day discover that it has been venting into your attic, and that your attic is thus absolutely full of toxic mold that will cost a small fortune to remove. And if you don't remove it, you're endangering your health and possibly making your house unsellable.
As it turns out, most jurisdictions in the US require, by way of the building code, that bathroom exhaust fans be vented directly outside. Had that law been in place in your jurisdiction, perhaps you wouldn't have a mold problem today.
2. Now imagine the FTC doesn't exist, or perhaps that its regulations are vastly simplified. You have a pension plan. You don't pay much attention to how your pension fund is invested. One day, you see on the news that your pension fund has dropped in value by 50%. It turns out the plan was heavily invested in a certain company that looked good in its prospectus but was actually in very bad shape.
If today's FTC existed, with its complex and obscure regulations on how a company must report its financial state, perhaps your pension fund managers would have been able to make a better decision.
3. Now suppose you rent an apartment. Your landlord turns the heat way down for no apparent reason, and it's 50 degrees in your unit all the time.
In many jurisdictions, there are laws requiring landlords to provide a minimum level of heating. With such a law in place, you could force the landlord to turn the heat back up.
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Each of these examples hinges on a law that most people will probably never think about. Yet you may indeed benefit from them many times in your life, without ever knowing it.
It could also be argued that such laws are not guaranteed to prevent the negative outcomes imagined above. This is true. No law will be obeyed 100% of the time. But that doesn't make them useless. Laws can and do influence behavior--when they come with an adequate enforcement mechanism, that is.
Not like the idea would be accepted but, this is a good direction to move into.
https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/293/293.F3d.791.99...
This is compelling precedent if the copyright dispute ever reaches the federal district court in DC.
I don't see it as requiring a special prohibition of "copyrighting laws", it stems directly from the fact that 'not public domain' is a variably mitigated example of 'secret'.
>>For the reasons discussed above, we REVERSE the district court's judgment against Peter Veeck, and REMAND with instructions to dismiss SBCCI's claims.
I'm told that this decision does not make precedent for the whole US, but rather only that which is under the United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.
See also: https://law.resource.org/
https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2008/04/16/can-states-...
Many states, publishers, and other entities try to claim copyright in parts of the published law:
http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/
Some activists have objected:
https://public.resource.org/index.html
It's an ongoing problem and is not "bullshit" at all.
The key is fighting back, copy the laws in California, add misdemeanour barratry as a counterclaim as well as SLAPP.
[1] Feist Pubs., Inc. v. Rural Tel. Svc. Co., Inc. - 499 U.S. 340 (1991) http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us...
[2] Practice Management v AMA - 121 F.3d 516 (9th Cir. 1997) [writ denied by SCOTUS] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/1997%20PMI%20...
In other words, once you digitize the code the first time, any git could update it.
That might actually be a great idea--store all state and federal laws in public Git repos. Each bill introduced to the legislature is a pull request and if they pass it, it gets merged.
Let's not make class warfare easier.
The Zotero lawsuit in Sept. 2008 broke a lot of my faith. I stuck around for a further two years trying to change things as best I could, and even managed to reshape TR's open source software policy, but I couldn't resolve the cognitive dissonance around competent legal practice virtually requiring a subscription to Westlaw and/or Lexis Nexis.
So, I got out. Ended up way happier. You can get out, too. TR has plenty of brilliant folks--engineers, managers, and executives alike--but it's hard to have organization-scale clarity of purpose and execution when you're dealing with 60,000 people.
I'm calling bullshit. The council should make a law that says all legal code stays in the public domain no matter what. Then a legal case would set up, and then all cities would have resolution on this.
There's nobody else but the council. We don't elect lexis-nexis, and council members are the only guys there that represent our interests.
Yes, it's certainly fair to say it's a complex issue, and there are good reasons why it's not available, but make no mistake: the council here is the only party responsible.
The hard part is compiling the bills. From the blog,
Each bill is then downloaded by an employee of the
company that wins the contract for maintaining the bill.
This person must hold a law degree from an ABA accredited
law school, and they cannot be a subcontractor.
This is why the code can be copyrighted. Like a cookbook which extends a recipe with "substantial literary expression", the code extends the bills with creative expression.
Who cares if they copyright the design, annotations, citations (dubious!), or database structures?
http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?id=13347
I'm not sure if D.C. is considered part of the federal government, but if it is, then there's nothing to worry about in terms of copyright violations.
Done.
To buy DC's case law for one attorney, it's a little under $2,000. http://legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.com/law-products/Westla...
I'm guessing the "fair market value" would be INSANE.
Subscriber Agreement and this Order Form will automatically renew for consecutive 12-month periods ("Renewal Term"), and the Monthly WestlawPRO Charges for the Renewal Term will increase 7% per year unless either party gives written notice of cancellation to the other party at least 30 days in advance of any Renewal Term
I mean I've heard of "jurisdictional arbitrage" but even for the US, this is starting to be insane when it applies to the actual letters of the law!
Today people think of "the United States" as both a singular noun and a singular government, but that's not the formal legal structure.
Your point is well taken, though: All laws ought to be open and freely available to the public. Anything else would be Orwellian.[3]
[1] If you hold the 10th amendment and its juridical descendants to have meaning.
[2] In the 18th-century sense of the word, i.e. a sovereign jurisdiction.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22 [4]
[4] Yes, I know Orwell didn't write Catch-22.
If you had direct access to people (DC, not Westlaw) with the power to change this. How would you phrase the argument against the current situation and what would you suggest as an alternative?
[1] http://macwright.org/2013/02/14/the-law-is-public-domain.htm...
Trying to get access to the underlying information and talking with the city's "chief information officer", turns out the actual budget numbers don't really quite add up due to department moves and program changes and such, so they literally have "a guy" who is entering numbers manually into a Word document based on black magic, to make it all add up.
This is the sort of thing where if the tech crowd pushes to get the output data open and accessible, it will be a strong incentive to stop the black magic happening earlier in the process.
so a citizen's access to a particular DC statute is impossible without that citizen infringing a copyright? I wonder if circumstances such as these would constitute "fair use" (which as i understand it is a valid defense to copyright infringement).
also, i'm aware that doing things that would otherwise constitute intellectual property infringement, can be justified by the "Essential Facilities" doctrine--originally an Anti-Trust safe harbor, though it's also been applied to IP. This seems to apply here.