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Update: Read the Press Democrat's editorial about Carl Malamud's work.
Over the Labor Day holiday--while some of us were playing croquet or barbecuing--public access advocate Carl Malamud posted online the 38-volume California Code of Regulations. Santa Rosa Press Democrat's Nathan Halverson reports on Malamud's latest exploit in a front page story today. Why? It seems the state claims copyright to those very laws.
In other words, for those of us who live in the Golden State--even though we must abide by California's laws--we're forbidden to store or distribute these regulations without the state's consent. Instead we're supposed to fork over $2000 plus for our own printed copies--or less for a digital version. Of course, that didn't stop Malamud, the founder and only staffer of public.resource.org who has an office here at O'Reilly in Sebastopol, CA. Indeed, "he's posted safety and building codes for nearly all 50 states, " reports Halverson.
Along with putting the "public" back in public safety codes, Malamud hopes to educate citizens about their rights. "After buying all these codes and scanning a stack of paper 10 feet tall (literally!), we ended up with close to 100 3-ring binders," explains Malamud. "Not wanting to waste all those fancy office supplies, we used the binders to create the set for Code City, a graphic novel that explains the issues involved in posting public safety codes and other law on the Internet."
You can read more about Malamud's efforts to give the public access to the codes that govern us, by checking out Halverson's story here. (Free registration may be required.) And if you want to download codes (caution, they are big files :), go to, http://bulk.resource.org/codes.gov/.
To learn a bit more about the story behind the codes, Malamud's Code City tale can be found here on Flickr.
Stay tuned, too. Malamud tells me open source Code City posters, magnets, mouse pads, and more, will be available soon.
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Interesting. I can understand the state asking for reimbursement to cover the costs of printing a copy, or providing a CD/DVD version, and I can understand the basics of the copyright (the Federal Government has similar strictures I believe on their documents) but not wanting every citizen to know what the laws say seems almost barbaric.
I guess the next question is, what exactly do they expect their citizenry to do, since clearly the state has no interest in actually helping.
I've used the CA legislature site www.leginfo.ca.gov/calaw.html to browse, search, save, and print laws for years now (and the interface hasn't changed a bit!) -- never suspecting any of these laws were copyrighted. They don't have any copyright notice on the search page.
@Genny - The leginfo site is the state statutes, or more accurately, the chapter laws. I'm not sure, but I don't think the legislative counsel actually claims copyright on the statutes, which the site you are using. Of course, the next stage in the process, West's Annotated California Codes and Deerings's California Codes, Annotated are proprietary.
That's a different situation from the administrative code, which is executive branch material. That's the material my group has been placing on-line. In those cases, the state does appear to claim copyright on the only, official version.
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