[Foundation-l] NYT: Who owns the law? (Noam Cohen)

[John Vandenberg]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 5:01 AM, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)
<newyorkbrad at gmail.com> wrote:
> In the US, actual court decisions and statutes are in the public domain,
> according to a seminal case called Wheaton v. Peters decided in the early
> nineteenth century.  (Wheaton and Peters were two of the early Reporters of
> Decisions for the U.S. Supreme Court.)  There is a host of caselaw dealing
> with questions such as whether the page citations for decisions are
> copyrightable and whether using them is fair use.  There are more recent
> disputes concerning whether private companies may assist munipalities in
> codifying their ordinances in return for an assignment of copyrightability
> on the collection.
>
> There is thus an ample body of free material that we could republish if we
> chose to.  However, Findlaw and similar sites are doing a reasonably good
> job of making caselaw and statutes available, so I don't know that there is
> a role here for Wikimedia at least regarding the law of the United States.
>
> Newyorkbrad

While not complete yet, Title 17 of the USC on Wikisource is an
example of how we _can_ do a better job.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Code/Title_17

It is complimented by many of the texts of the laws as they were enacted..

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/U.S._Public_Law_105-80

... and a house report which is often referred to to understand the
spirit of the changes that were made.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:H.R._Rep._No._94-1476

--
John