Federal District Court Rules That Laws Can Be Hidden Behind Paywalls
Originally posted on Anti-aggressionleague.com on February 6, 2017
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
A federal district court has ruled that private standards organizations that write regulations, which are incorporated into federal law, can use copyright to deny access to knowledge of those regulations. The ruling came against Public.Resource.org, a site that publishes government documents on federal and state laws including regulations that become law through incorporation by reference: regulations that are initially created by private standards organizations and incorporated into federal law, but are not published in the federal code. Six private standards organizations filed suit against Public.Resource.org for what they claim is copyright infringement. As the EFF pointed out, this sets a precedent for a more secretive government since lobbyists and special interest groups often write draft bills that are passed verbatim. Citizens already break laws they don’t know about, but this will simply exacerbate the problem.
So if I'm understanding correctly, we now have laws being passed that we do not know about, cannot find out about, yet we can be punished for disobeying.......OK then I'll have to go find a cave or a bigger mushroom or something :-)
In practice, it wouldn't seem like much of a deviation from the norm. The vast majority of Americans are oblivious to the vast majority of federal criminal code and federal regulations. That includes me. None of us have read through the tens of thousands of pages of U.S.C. This extra veil of obscruity just ensures those few people that tend to be privy to these sorts of schemes won't object. You can't object to something you don't know about.
Agreed.
But I do wonder if so much red tape means it ties itself in a bow?
so convoluted that there is a loophole for every clause.
Makes the lawyers rich initially, until they MUST be replaced by AI and the whole thing just comes falling down.
I just has a thought:
what about a steem based law system.....ummmm that would be interesting.