Tomorrow’s Guardian has an amazing story [1] about a British Government’s proposal to charge for access to legal information, when value has been added to the raw text.
A few juicy quotes:
Firstly, an astounding Crown copyright notice greets the reader: “The Statute Law Database and the material on the SLD website are subject to Crown copyright protection. The Crown copyright waiver that applies to published legislation generally does not apply to SLD because it is a value-added product. Any reuse of material from SLD will be the subject of separate and specific licensing arrangements. No such arrangements have yet been entered into. Users should not therefore reproduce or reuse any material from SLD until further guidance is issued.”
This is not how it could, or should, have happened. In the US, where information compiled at public expense by public officials is copyright free, the public has had access to consolidated law for decades. Since 1992, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University in New York has been the leading online resource for US law and Supreme Court decisions. “The raw material for our United States Code collection is provided us by the law revision counsel’s office in the House of Representatives,” says institute director Thomas R Bruce. “They have actively helped us with the things we publish.”
Even Canada, which inherited Crown copyright from us, provides its citizens free access to parliamentary law. In the mid-90s the University of Montreal, which now operates the Canadian Legal Information Institute, set out to remove copyright limits on the distribution of law. It succeeded and the Reproduction of Federal Law Order [2] was issued in late 1996.
Meanwhile, in the UK, we’re still suffering under the yoke of Crown copyright. “This copyright situation manages to be bad for business, bad for lawyers, bad for the general public and bad for our freedom all at the same time,” Irving said.
My question to our British readers is – is this true? Since the FAQs on Crown Copyright [3]tell a very different story.