Liberating the Laws You Must Pay To Read 223
Writing for Boing Boing, Carl Malamud describes the campaign he's been waging to let U.S. citizens read the public safety standards that have become part of federal law — without needing to pay for the privilege. "These public safety standards govern and protect a wide range of activity, from how bicycle helmets are constructed to how to test for lead in water to the safety characteristics of hearing aids and protective footwear." Despite a U.S. Appeals Court ruling which said 'the law' should be in the public domain, many safety codes are still privately produced and then distributed for a fee, to recoup development costs. "Public.Resource.Org has a mission of making the law available to all citizens, and these technical standards are a big black hole in the legal universe. We've taken a gamble and spent $7,414.26 to buy 73 of these technical public safety standards that are incorporated into the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations." Malamud and his Public.Resource.Org foundation are trying — very cautiously — to make these laws more broadly available. "...even though we strongly believe that the documents are not entitled to copyright protection, and moreover that our limited print run is in any case definitely fair use, if a judge were to decide that what we did was breaking the law, 25 copies of 73 standards works out to $273,750,000 in potential liability. While whales may make bigger bets, we draw the line at $273 million."
Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excuse. (Score:5, Insightful)
So why doesn't anybody ask about "inability to afford a copy of the law" as an excuse.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignorance of the law becomes quite common when you have a ridiculous amount of inane laws.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
Incorporation by reference... (Score:4, Insightful)
Incorporation by reference is one of the tools that private corporations use to get their will imposed through government regulation. It is a shady practice at best, and leads to all kinds of problems with unfunded mandates being exercised on the people, among other things.
Many standards must be licensed, generate quite a bit of revenue for the private companies that develop them.
It is true that many standards are costly to develop, but therein lies the problem - if we need them, we should be paying for them once and making them available to everyone.
This practice should be immediately outlawed, and all regulatory standards should be made open and free to citizens at no cost.
Here is a listing of all the standards incorporated by reference into the Federal Register:
http://standards.gov/sibr/query/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.main [standards.gov]
See:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_by_reference [wikipedia.org]
- http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/cfr/ibr-locations.html [archives.gov]
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:2, Insightful)
What was the literacy rate in his kingdom?
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only that - if the law isn't so fucking convoluted and obtuse and hidden away, how the hell are the lawyer vampire class ever going to justify being a drain on society by requiring you to consult a lawyer before doing anything?
Regulatory capture was invented by the lawyer class. That's why the first thing a sane society would do is outlaw lawyers.
Laws referencing SAE and UL standards. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is probably done on purpose.
A large corporation can afford to follow Congressional laws and go buy all these private, expensive standards. Small businesses cannot. It's yet another way that regulations are used by megacorps to protect themselves from new, upstart competition.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
And corruption. Let a system grow complex enough, and the little guys won't be able to accomplish anything, because they won't have the money, the cronies, or the will to compromise, to make the rusty wheels of the broken system turn. It happened in IT with the introduction of *silly* patents (I have nothing against patenting things that a couple random programmers can't replicate in a weekend).
Like, say, the byzantine empire, such systems usually imploded, people stop giving a damn about defending it. But now we have technology and such a broken system can go on for eternity because computers and robots don't get demotivated. We may fear computers that get too intelligent, but the problem is with the not-smart-enough ones.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
I support the congresswoman's response. That question deserved no response for a couple of reasons:
1) In the very pramble the national government is esablished to "promote the general Welfare". While that particular phase is very open to interpretaion, it is hard to see that a publically avalible hospital is not in the direction of "the general Welfare".
2) Section 8 of the Constitution once again allows specifically for taxation "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". One could agure that this only means the general welfare of the Unites States as a body and not the individual of it. But that seems contrary to the general spirit of the document, and would have to be decided by the US Supreme Court. Since they have specifically not said so, the overwhelming presumption must be that it is in keeping with the law.
3) Presumably the question was grounded out of something like "why should the government be allowed to complete (unfairly) with private business". But this is a common misconception about corporations and the Constitution. At the founding of the US Constitution corprations were only founded by express will of the goverment, and they were founded to a specific purpose (not profits). The profits were only a sweetener that was allowed to get the job done. Coporartions charters were often specific about the lifetime of the corporation and there were a list of clauses that would end the Coporation if it was found to not be living up to its charter. The modern idea of the corporation as a profit-driven mostly-imortal quasi-person did not start to take hold untill the mid-1800s. For reference I will direct people to the Mercantilism section of the Corporation article in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#Mercantilism
So if you are a "fundamentalist" about the US Constitution you should expect that the govenement should be the one behind large institutions such as hospitals. It is just that many "Conservatives" have the dream of a golden age in their heads and have proven very willing to not let the truth get in their way.
I for one would like to see a move more in that direction, at least in the requring of Public Coporations to have a charter (I don't see the need for expiry), and to the practice exercise the death penalty on them when they violate it.
ignorance of the law (Score:4, Insightful)
So in the US, ignorance of the law is not a legal defence, however you need to spend money to find out what the law says?
wow.
Re:If it the law... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not? The Obama administration would like to raise the estate tax (death tax), tax on dividends, etc.
You've already paid taxes on the things you own, and when you die, they tax your family so much, they may not be able to own the things you left for them.
Why should your family have a right to inherit? You did not choose your parents. Whether you have wealthy parents to inherit is a crapshoot.
The egalitarian approach would be to have a 100% inheritance tax, so only those willing to pay the actual value to obtain something of sentimental value will inherit it..
Then auction off the rest, and use the money to provide all children with good living standards, education and healthcare.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what you get when you allow private industry and corporatist groups like ALEC to write the laws.
The reason we have laws that are "fucking convoluted and obtuse and hidden away" is because there's somebody who is profiting from those laws being that way. There is no other reason.
You get corporations with such an interest in the law because the law started having such a heavy hand in how you do business. If you can't open a simple food stand without getting 5 permits and inspections from 3 agencies you can bet that the entire industry is going to start seeing that as a cost of doing business and start using their lobbying power to either reduce that cost or make that cost profitable.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you can pretty much extend that to "a ____ lawyer has lobbied for more complicated ____ laws to increase the number of people hiring ____ lawyers" and still have a factual statement.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Welfare_clause [wikipedia.org]. It's not very clear. It looks like "General Welfare", within the 1900s gradually grew to include more and more things. Fits in very nicely with the expansion of federal power in other areas over our history.
These quotes are also interesting
The two primary authors of the The Federalist essays set forth two separate, conflicting interpretations:
James Madison advocated for the ratification of the Constitution in The Federalist and at the Virginia ratifying convention upon a narrow construction of the clause,asserting that spending must be at least tangentially tied to one of the other specifically enumerated powers, such as regulating interstate or foreign commerce, or providing for the military, as the General Welfare Clause is not a specific grant of power, but a statement of purpose qualifying the power to tax.[9][10]
Alexander Hamilton, only after the Constitution had been ratified,[11] argued for a broad interpretation which viewed spending as an enumerated power Congress could exercise independently to benefit the general welfare, such as to assist national needs in agriculture or education, provided that the spending is general in nature and does not favor any specific section of the country over any other.[12]
Personally, I think only Madison's interpretation fits in with the rest of the document. Otherwise congress can arbitrarily grant themselves new powers without an amendment. What's the point of the amendment process if you can just say "General Welfare". For example, "for the general welfare we enact an income tax". No, they passed an amendment.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:4, Insightful)
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20."
Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
"I only got a dollar out of the $20," declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, "but he got $10!"
"Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!"
"That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"
"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.