Oregon

Ars Technica reminds us that the copyright squabble between the Legislative Counsel Committee of the State of Oregon (the "Committee") and Justia and Public.Resource.Org is still going on, and it may erupt into a full-on legal battle soon. That would be fine, in my view, because we could use a strong court decision putting to rest the argument that the "arrangement and display" of state statutes are copyrightable. For details on this argument, see my previous post.

After a rather feisty beginning, Carl Malamud from Public.Resource.Org and Tim Stanley from Justia participated in a conference call with Committee representatives in late April, during which they discussed the possibility of a mutually acceptable licensing solution. As part of this negotiation, Oregon proposed a "public license" that would allow Justia and Public.Resource.Org to continue to post the Oregon Revised Statutes. I haven't been able to get a copy of the proposed license itself, but it sounds like it was complicated and restrictive. In a subsequent letter sent to the Committee, Malamud referred to it as the "so-called 'public' license," complained about its lengthiness, and called it "incompatible with how public domain data is distributed."  read more »

Just last week, I was ruminating on the viability of state claims of copyright in government records. At the time, I was pretty confident that a state wouldn't be crazy enough to claim copyright in its own statutes, both because caselaw suggests this would be legally invalid and because it would be shoddy public policy. Now, the Legislative Counsel Committee of the State of Oregon has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Justia, a free online resource for judicial decisions and statutes, claiming that Justia's posting of the Oregon Revised Statutes violates its copyright. The Committee's claim is not as outlandish as it initially sounds, but it is still quite problematic.

The Committee is not claiming copyright in the text of the law itself. Smart thinking -- Tim Armstrong at Info/Law does a better job than I could marshalling the cases suggesting that any copyright claim to the text would be doomed. (The most exciting of these cases is Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l, 293 F.3d 791 (5th Cir. 2002) (en banc), if only because it's from this century.) Instead, the Committee claims copyright in   read more »

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reports that Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski recently signed two bills that increase public access to government records.

The first of the two bills now requires that "the public body receiving the request shall respond as soon as practicable and without unreasonable delay." While this is an improvement over the prior law, which merely required that the requester be given a "reasonable opportunity to inspect or copy the public record," see ORS 192.440, Oregon still provides no set time period by which a governmental body must respond to a request for public records.   read more »