Thread by @doctorow

Well this is a hell of a day: it's the day that the Supreme Court affirmed that @carlmalamud was legally in the right when he removed the paywall from the state of Georgia's lawbooks and published its laws online for anyone to read.

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

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Malamud is the rogue archivist who'd made a career out of acts of civil disobedience, lately scanning, transcribing, formatting and uploading laws (including safety standards incorporated into the law by reference) for anyone to read, for free.

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He's done this based on the ancient principle - the principle as ancient as the the Magna Carta - that if the law isn't free for all to read, it's not the law.

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The Supreme Court's ruling - while fabulous news - is kind of a mess, as @mmasnick writes in @techdirt:

techdirt.com/articles/20200…

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The decision turns on whether someone working on behalf of a government can be an "author," which, again, is kind of a weird way to get there. And as Masnick writes, the judges throw in some good, spicy stuff.

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For example, "The animating principle behind this rule is that no one can own the law. 'Every citizen is presumed to know the law,' and 'it needs no argument to show . . . that all should have free access” to its contents.'"

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And the judges also say that the fact that their decision might make it hard to convince giant corporations like Lexis-Nexis to help Georgia write its laws, that this is Lexis-Nexis's problems, not copyright's.

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And finally, as Masnick points out, the judges use the traditional term for copyright, "monopoly protection," which, as Masnick points out, "seems to make a lot of copyright maximalists lose their minds."

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Anyway, huge congrats to Carl and his little nonprofit, Public Resource: you made good law, about the law!

eof/