Daily Archives: April 8, 2009

Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer

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“Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer”


NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08/09-1

JAMES GRIMMELMANN, New York Law School

Recently, the state of Oregon has used copyright law to threaten people who were publishing its laws online. Can they really do that?

More to the point, why would they? This essay will put the Oregon fracas in historical context, and explain the public policies at stake. Ultimately, it’ll try to convince you that Oregon’s demands, while wrong, aren’t unprecedented. People have been claiming copyright in the law for a long time, and at times they’ve been able to make a halfway convincing case for it. While there are good answers to these arguments, they’re not always the first ones that come to hand. It’s really only the arrival of the Internet that genuinely puts the long-standing goal of free and unencumbered access to the law within our grasp.

This essay, written for nonlawyers and people interested in contemporary debates over access to the law, explains what’s at stake in the Oregon dispute, how people have tried such things before, the role of new technologies in improving legal publishing, what the law has to say about it, and where we ought to go from here.

 

Source:  LSN Legal Information & Technology Vol. 1 No. 8,  04/08/2009

Thinking about Think Tanks

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The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) has a valuable 2007 report identifying  top think tanks around the globe: The Global “Go-To Think Tanks:” The Leading Public Policy Research Organizations in the World.

Hat tip to DocuTicker.

Changes to Publishing Industry in China

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From Today’s Financial Times

Beijing in pledge to end publishing sector monopoly

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4d4bdd08-23d3-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html

China’s Communist government yesterday pledged to end the monopoly held by state publishing houses by allowing private companies to produce books legally for the first time in more than half a century.

The General Administration of Press and Publications, the industry regulator, said the government would “encourage and support non-public capital” and “make non-public publishers an important component” of the Chinese language book industry.

“This is a historic moment because, ever since the 1950s, China has insisted that all book publishing be state-run,” said Xue Ye, secretary-general of the China Private Book Industry Committee, set up in 2000 ahead of China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation.