You cannot have a digital copy of the DC Code

This is certainly a problem, but I see a larger, more troubling problem here associated with access to the legal code.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

Working with the local Code for America group, we've been trying to put a basic budget app online and it's an amazing clusterfuck. The city published incredibly incomplete budget docs in a Google Fusion table, and more detailed documents in images-embedded-in-PDFs.<p>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.<p>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.

"...this is not a failure of the Council itself..."<p>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 <i>all</i> cities would have resolution on this.<p>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.<p>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 <i>only</i> party responsible.

You could make your own. Take the bills (which are free) and compile them yourself. Boom, your own copy of the DC Code. You can then release it under a permissive license or whatever.<p>The hard part is compiling the bills. From the blog,<p><pre><code> 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. </code></pre> (<a href="http://macwright.org/2013/02/13/the-code-compiled.html" rel="nofollow">http://macwright.org/2013/02/13/the-code-compiled.html</a>)<p>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.

Just scan the books, OCR the scans, and remove the copyrighted information that the publisher added to the codes. You then have a perfectly legal, digital copy. Nobody does this because the codes change over time and there's no way to protect your work. It would be freely available to everyone as soon as the first copy hits an open server. It would also be nearly worthless as soon as the new version comes out (do you want to be the attorney that shows up to court without knowing the new changes?).

Why is something as basic as the description and distribution of public law not treated the same across all US states? Surely, this is one area where Federal statute must apply...<p>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!

Bullshit. There is no way the law is subject to copyright. The contractor may claim copyright but I doubt it would standup in court at all.

Crowdsource a complete transcription and make it public. That should be legal, but I'm not totally sure, since I don't have a copy of the law.

I've long felt that novel legal arguments should be considered intellectual property. Once lawyers are forced to pay to cite precedent, the whole landscape will change....

You can look at the DC Code from links here <a href="http://dc.gov/DC/Government/DC+Courts+&#38;+Laws/DC+Laws" rel="nofollow">http://dc.gov/DC/Government/DC+Courts+&#38;+Laws/DC+Laws</a>, but you cannot have it to re-use or republish. The guy posting does a lot with open maps, so he probably wants to reuse the data in more interesting way.

This article almost makes me want to create my own automated scanner/ocr just to distribute it in torrent.

I cannot understand how its in public domain and you are not allowed to make a digital copy. Obviously if someone has gone through the process of digitizing, even if its in public domain, they can have a copyright over the specific digital copy. However that doesn't stop you from creating a copy yourself, right ? For sure that's not easily done but still that doesn't mean you are not allowed to do so. Am i missing something ?

disclaimer: my understanding of the legislative process is based entirely on Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm Just a Bill" (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyeJ55o3El0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyeJ55o3El0</a>).<p>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).<p>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.

How about an "altruist black-hat" in China scrape the site then post a torrent? This sort of thing has as much a potential for good as it has for mischief. Someone could organize this.

Federal laws are not copyrightable per 17 U.S.C. § 105:<p><a href="http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?id=13347" rel="nofollow">http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?id=13347</a><p>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.

Serious question...<p>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?

as someone who works for TR, this makes me sad.

The individual governments that are in this bind should just TAKE their copyright back by eminent domain.<p>Done.

AFAIK all code books are like this. I've never seen one that is free but I might be wrong.

Aren't statutes and laws merely facts? I thought facts aren't protected by copyright.