Commentary urging no Copyrighted SmartRegs law out in Today’s Camera
The morning of Tuesday, July 6th the Daily Camera has published a guest commentary from FairFAR.org on the city staff’s proposal to adopt a privately-owned and copyrighted law.
Please note one small correction, which came up in a discussion with Carl Malamud of resource.org after the commentary had been submitted: the 1834 Wheaton v. Peters case was actually over whether the official court reporter, not a journalist per se, could claim copyright on the Supreme Court’s opinions. The mistake stemmed from the editing process of shortening it to fit the 750 word limit–we had shortened “court reporter” to “reporter”, which then was inadvertently replaced with “journalist” for stylistic reasons. Our mistake.
We are working on a short primer about what we’ve learned about the complicated legal history of the issue of whether the law can be privately owned and copyrighted or not, and hope to make it available shortly. Check back soon or subscribe to our RSS feed.
* FairFAR.org note: As the result of our critiques and the hard work of others, the IPMC and other ICC building codes are now publicly accessible online for free.