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The "Principle of Access to Information" (PAI) expressed in the legislation of many countries — usually countries with some "Access to Information Act" or freedom of information laws —, apply to any law document or "obligation rule records", stated by the State. In some countries the obligation of law-publicity and no-payment for information is reinforced by the Ignorantia juris non excusat.

The question here is

How to use PAI for (legally) demonstrate that any other norm or document, citaed by a law document, must be submited also to the PAI?

This situation is similar to the "contamination by use" of a share-alike licenced document (ex. CC by-sa), but here the mechanism is "contamination by citation".

Notes and examples:

This is a question for use with any democratic country where we can start with the hypothesis that “country's law has no copyright”. So, the question is: how to (!?) convince citizens, the government and the court that "any document cited by law also has no copyright"?

Examples where the problem was recognized by court:

Example where the problem (of no oficial answering of this question) exist:

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Peter Krauss
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  • are you asking for precedent? or an example of how to display/enforce it? i know this is the battle brewing between municode and u.s. localities that use it to display government documents – albert Jul 10 '15 at 18:45
  • @albert thanks, two issues... (1) yes I'm looking for precedent or any other kind of "juri decision" or "law change", in response to the "contamination by citation". (2) I do not known Municode Corporation, but seems a good case, where govern transferred publishing rights to municode ... them municode enforced citizens to pay for the "contaminated documents" (supposing that in USA documents cited by law must be free and Open Access)... do you have a link for it? – Peter Krauss Jul 10 '15 at 19:39
  • this addresses the problem, not the corporation specifically, though it mentions others: http://www.govtech.com/DC-Takes-an-Open-Data-Approach-to-Muni-Code.html – albert Jul 10 '15 at 19:43
  • @albert Hum... it is embarrassing for "USA as a democracy model" ;-) your link say that "A number of states and localities place a copyright on the actual published copy of their laws, and also outsource the code's upkeep to a private company". This is a reality for USA-law? There are no "US-government official gazette", with free access to citizens? – Peter Krauss Jul 10 '15 at 20:05
  • If anyone was involved in such a decision, I suspect it would be Carl Malamud : https://public.resource.org/ – Joe Jul 14 '15 at 14:42
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    @Joe, thanks! Carl sent me fast comments. He have a very interesting video and article at https://public.resource.org/edicts/ ... A good summary of Carl's position, about the general subject of this kind of question, is “the law has no copyright”. – Peter Krauss Jul 14 '15 at 15:16
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    Hum... even with a bounty, no answer... so, let's do a proposal :-) https://github.com/okfn/opendefinition/issues/114 – Peter Krauss Jul 16 '15 at 02:44
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    "In any democratic country we can start with the hypothesis that “country's law has no copyright”." I think this is a major problem to begin with - it's simply not the case that this is always true for all countries (or all parts of all countries). – Andrew is gone Jul 16 '15 at 11:11
  • @Andrew, thanks (!). I edited, check if now is correct. It is a "working hypothesis"... – Peter Krauss Jul 16 '15 at 12:15
  • @PeterKrauss here's another one to watch in the US: the state of Georgia is suing Public Resource for posting state laws http://ia801504.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.gand.218354/gov.uscourts.gand.218354.docket.html – albert Jul 24 '15 at 01:32
  • Hi @albert, thanks! hum... I am not an expert, how to interpret this "logs"? I think this PDF is the only human-readable ;-) But the document have "Filed 07/21/15", and Wikipedia says that Malamud’s campaign to become US Public Printer is 2009... Do you have more links about? .... Perhaps can help in the Wikipedia's discussion about it – Peter Krauss Jul 24 '15 at 14:49
  • not really....if you don't mind, email me so we can take this out of comments - jalbertbowden google's email service. – albert Jul 24 '15 at 17:38

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