Mississippi The Latest State To Claim Copyright Over Official Compilation Of Its Laws

from the locking-up-the-law dept

We’ve written about Carl Malamud and his ongoing crusade to make sure that the law is actually publicly accessible and not locked up by copyright. Just recently, we noted that he’d run into some troubles with Georgia, and it appears now he’s facing a similar challenge from Mississippi. The basic story was actually posted as an update to Malamud’s ongoing Kickstarter project, which we’ve already told you about.

The issue? Malamud had purchased, formatted and posted Mississippi’s Code of Law, Annotated. As with Georgia, the real issue seems to be in the question of whether or not the annotations themselves are covered by copyright, as they’re often produced and sold by a private company (usually LexisNexis), but in coordination with the government. That’s the case here, as the letter Malamud received from Mississippi’s intellectual property counsel, Larry Schemmel, suggests. Schemmel goes to great lengths to point out that the unannotated code is “freely available,” but that the “creative work” behind the annotations is covered by copyright, and thus should be taken off of Malamud’s site.

However, as Malamud notes in his response letter (complete with a bunch of “exhibits”), the State of Mississippi makes it fairly clear that the annotated code is part of the law, and thus he argues it, too, should be freely accessible:

Exhibit K contains the marketing literature provided by your vendor. As you can see, any citizen and certainly any lawyer would feel totally remiss in not using the the official annotated version of the Code. The marketing literature stresses that:

Be sure that the law you read is the law indeed
Official isn’t just a word. It’s a process. The Mississippi Joint Legislative Committee on Compilation, Revision and Publication of Legislation maintains careful editorial control over the publication of the official code, from the moment LexisNexis receives the acts to the final galley proofs of the finished product. Their strict supervision ensures that the published code and its supplements contain no errors in content, conform carefully to the numbering scheme, and publish in a timely manner.

Cite the code that’s guaranteed to be right Because it’s official, you can rely on LexisNexis’ Mississippi Code of 1972 Annotated for the correct statement of the law …

As you can see, it is very clear that the Code is the official statement of the law as promulgated by the State. This is not some independent commercial endeavor, this is an official process under the direction of the State.

I have attached as Exhibit L the same section earlier attached from Exhibit D, this one being the annotated version. As you can see by comparing the two, the Annotated Code includes important cross references, research references, and Editor’s Notes. The Editor’s notes are not simply creative work, they are important materials. For example, the note to § 1-1-11 is a reference to a statement adopted by the Joint Legislative Committee on Compilation, Revision and Publication of Legislation. Statements such as these are part and parcel of the law, statements of the codifiers that add important information to the original statutes.

Malamud further challenges (in great detail) the argument that even the unannotated version is freely available, noting that LexisNexis throws up a giant pop-up before you can access it that requires you to agree to terms and conditions that are not at all reasonable for public domain information like official laws.

Those Terms and Conditions, which are attached in Exhibit B, consists of an extensive license agreement spanning 5 pages of exceedingly technical language in fine print.

Some of the highlights of the agreement include fairly draconian prohibitions against efective use, including a prohibitions against the ability to “copy, modify, reproduce, republish, distribute, display, or transmit for commercial, non-profit or public purposes all or any portion of this Web Site.”

He also notes that LexisNexis has made it impossible to share the information contained in even the unannotated law via a URL:

The user interface your vendor presents is full of links to various proprietary products, but there is a little print icon, which presents a semi-clean version of the text, as shown in Exhibit E. However, there is a huge flaw in the user interface, in that the URL that is presented does not allow a user to share what they are looking at with other users. If you mail the URL to a friend, you don’t get the section of the Code, you get a screen from your vendor hawking proprietary products as shown in Exhibit F.

He further notes that the site LexisNexis put together is “replete with HTML errors” as well as CSS errors, preventing modern browsers from being able to display it properly. Also (and this is potentially a big legal issue), the site does not comply with the accessbility requirements of the US Rehabilitation Act, which requires such information be made available to people with disabilities.

Malamud, in his Kickstarter update also highlights the incredibly detailed and painstaking process by which he sent this particular response to officials in Mississippi. This includes printing it all out and binding it very professionally, sending along a professional grade self-inking rubber stamp with the statement originally stated by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer that “If a law isn’t public, it isn’t a law,” and finally packing the whole thing up in a box with red, blue and white “crinkle-pak” in the design of the Mississippi flag. Here are just a few of the photos (more if you click on any of the images which will take you to the update):

This may seem like overkill (or just showing off your packing skills), but as Malamud explains, there’s a very important reason to go to this level of detail:

You may wonder why all the hooptedoodle and fancy printing? We want to send a message that we’re very serious about this and that posting the Mississippi Code was not a casual hack, but a deliberate and carefully considered decision to make the laws of the states available to citizens. I’ve been presenting these kinds of issues to governments for over 20 years, and I’ve learned that you have to show determination, and nothing shows determination like a professional-grade rubber stamp.

On that note, I’m heading out to get some professional-grade rubber stamps.

Filed Under: annotated code, carl malamud, copyright, laws, mississippi
Companies: lexisnexis, public.resource.org