 Questions of the witnesses. Senator Nelson please yes, thank you. The case laws copyrighted you put those online. The case law that we found no we don't we did not believe this copyrighted and we put that on we put you to put that on line. Mr. Chair Senator Nelson it's generally recognized that case law is not copyrighted. We've put 50 years of Court of Appeals decisions online for example for use by anybody and I think the important point is that this material by being very broadly available leads to organizations like Justia building a better mousetrap but also leads to universities like Columbia University in Colorado and Cornell building services for the public. A lot of solo practitioners government lawyers and laymen simply don't have access to the legal materials they need to to practice their professions. Thank you. And the case law Senator Nelson involves attempts to copyright sort of arrangements of case law and it's rejected those attempts at copyright of things like parallel citations and subsequent history. Senator Burdick. Okay Senator Burdick. Thank you and this is actually both for you all and our counsel here Mr. Johnson. First of all Mr. Malamud you said something about you wanted high school students to be able to download the ORS to create a better version. I wanted to ask you what you meant by that. Mr. Chairman Senator Burdick I think we don't know where innovation comes from as you know Google was starting in a garage you can't really say that that better legal research tools are going to come from this place or that place and I used as a hypothetical example a high school student programming whiz of which there are many all over the country being able to download the material and say I can do a better citator or I can compare code sections more effectively and being able to take that and put it online and maybe put some Google ad words on it to pay for the server costs and by having any kind of a license creative commons or a public license or a commercial license it discourages that kind of innovation and it does so without enhancing the revenue stream so there's real no there's really no great benefit of restricting access to the organ revised statutes but we pay because a lot of people get discouraged and I've seen this very often on on it particularly in Washington DC where I've done a lot of work looking at issues like copyright over Smithsonian photos when you put a license on there it discourages use it's really quite that simple and and I think that's the opposite of the public policy goal that one has for the dissemination of the law that was my follow-up question which is why how would the creative commons license discourage what you want to know is why couldn't you do the things that you're talking about with with that license and I wanted to get Mr. Johnston Mr. Chairman Senator Burdick it discourages it for a couple reasons now there's different kinds of creative commons licenses you can have a creative common license that says no derivative works non-commercial use only now the problem with that is it's very hard to distinguish between the non-commercial and the commercial use and presumably if there were a creative commons license it would say non-commercial use only and the problem there is how do you distinguish what is commercial and non-commercial so for example Google ad words that pay for the cost of a server is that commercial or if somebody starts off non-commercial at a university and then one wants to go off and start a business with better legal tools for lawyers that goes over that line and that puts the legislature in the position of having to decide on a case by case basis which uses are okay and which ones are not that's inherent in the licensing process and it is our belief that particularly for the acts of the legislature which is as close to the center of the public domain as one can get that is not meeting the policy goals enunciated we think by the legislature in the statutes but also by the courts repeatedly but it also doesn't meet the way the internet works today which is lots and lots of copies for example Tim is trying to put together codes from all 50 states and you can imagine if he's got 50 different license agreements he's got a look at and decide well am I allowed to use this state can I use that state what happens if I bundle them all together what happens if somebody downloads it from Tim's site and does something else with it because on our side there's no registration anybody can download any court case that we have so we can't impose the requirement that you can only do this or you can only do that excuse me I wanted to hear what Dexter oh I'm sorry yes you're right council Dexter thank you thank you Mr. Chair Senator verdict there's no legal impediment to requiring a license agreement there's a question about as Mr. Maloney mentioned about how would you want to directly office to take steps to enforce the terms of that license agreement and if so how much resources would you want to dedicate to that because it could be a very much an escalating enterprise as people take the material and use it differently represent a heart please thank you Mr. Chair help me understand we've talked about the version of the of ORS that is available on the legislative website for free there's no question about that any any copyright or licensure on that and then the version that that legislative council actually publishes which has additional formatting issues and annotation and other helps to it help me understand how the online version that has all the laws just doesn't have the additional helps the additional formatting how access to that doesn't get you to both the needs that you all have but also the needs of that that kid in the high school the high school organ is a garage in terms of his ability to take it to the next step I mean I think the the way it's been at least percent to us though that would include that there's copyright being claimed on the numbering the titles for the sections as well as the order most the organizations you could basically take I think the text without any of the numbering or any of the headings right and you'd have to randomize that tax and that's what you would have I don't think that'd be too useful that at least that's what my take on it is if unless I'm missing something that would be helpful to have yet Mr. Chair and Representative Hunt in your material got examples of what is copyrighted and what's not copyrighted what where copyright claim isn't and some of this material namely the lead lines or as numbering system the chapter outlines they are on the legislative website as well it's the index and annotations that are not on the website so so the witnesses are corrected portion of the internet material is copyright is claimed on portion of the copyrighted material is not on the website and I think the witnesses also are corrected if you did not have the ORS numbers or the lead lines it would be not very user-friendly so if I can follow up Mr. Chair sure so if it had the numbering obviously I don't even understand how that could be part of the copyright I when I was reading this I thought I was just talking about the lead lines but but assuming that there was the numbering which would have to go along with it and even if the lead lines were there are you saying access to that without copyright not so much the other helps and organizational pieces that may be in the front or the back of the actual published document that does it would that get you access to that information get you what you what you think is needed both for you and for others majority leader hunt mr. Chairman it would be better than nothing on the other hand I'm not sure it serves the the policy goals of broader dissemination of the law I think the annotations and the other materials are still a work product of the government and more importantly this is information that really needs to be more broadly disseminated so if if if all we can do is copy the Oregon revised statutes website and then redeploy that with the section numbers but without the annotations that's okay on the other hand the best annotator of the Oregon revised statutes is in fact the legislative council of the legislature and it seems like it meets the policy aim of broader dissemination by giving out as much as you can rather than the minimal and I think that goes to Tim Stanley's point of putting all the versions of the Oregon revised statutes online I actually believe if you did that and also released all your annotations and the formatting marks and all the things that are you know the part and parcel the official version that has as good a chance of increasing total revenue to the state as it does of decreasing in this internet day and age when you have a barrier to access it reduces the size of the market and so I actually believe there's a very strong argument to be made that by relinquishing copyright and selling the official versions and giving away as much as possible it will make the statutes more relevant more people will know about them more of them will end up using them as part of their work and will go by the official copy and we strongly believe that that that would in fact be a potential outcome of this. I can have one last roll up on that the that's an interesting theory you posture that I'm not sure I buy it it's a theory maybe you'd be able to guarantee financially the your supposition there as we budget in the next biennium I think one of the balances that we all strike is that balance between access public dissemination and also trying to protect taxpayers instead of you know in saying that taxpayers are paying Dexter and his team to go through that whole process and add all that value to the basic statute and how do we protect taxpayers to make sure that they're recouping as much cost at the same time the saying taxpayers also need access to the information and so I think I mean I certainly start with supposition that if we remove the copyright we're going to lose we're going to lose sales and lose value so we jump to two different conclusions we can touch base a few years to find out who's right but I think that that's the difficulty the balance we strike is just trying to figure out how we how we meet two goals which may be maybe diametrically opposed in this case. If I may add just one thing on that I understand that 100% I've worked in government and I understand that balancing the budget is very important that these things cost a lot of money to produce on the other hand my understanding and I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that that copyright just simply cannot be asserted on on these works of the government coming out of the legislature and therefore other tools should be used to protect the revenue stream but copyright is not at least again in my opinion I'm not a judge I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that that's not a tool available to the legislature for works of the government and again I'm not a lawyer I'm not a judge. Thank you Mr. Chair so I think I'm I'm generally with you and what you're arguing that it is in the public interest and maybe that the law is on your side that copyrighting these statutes at least in about half of the case this seems to be not where states are heading and then maybe this is because I'm stuck in the 20th century I'm still having trouble with the where the public interest in the creative aspect of presenting statutes and their accompanying rules and case law is really in the public interest and I'll just share with you a little bit of my own experience and I am married to a lawyer so you know usually I don't have that much trouble finding things but I know from my own experience when I'm trying to find a recent court decision it's not always easy to find the full text of a decision online although what I usually do and it should have been it be a first resort not a last one is call the state from whence the decision came say hi I'm little person here in Oregon trying to find this decision can you help me and usually they're very nice about talking you through the website to what you want giving you the link and then there it is so to me as a non-lawyer you know it seems like what people would really want to see are statutes the rules that implement them and then the case law that interprets them and beyond that in my view everything else is just opinion whether it comes from a lawyer or you know somebody like me so how is having all these different versions and formats out there in Cyberland really that helpful to what real people would need in just trying to solve their own understanding of the law or even a pro say legal representation yeah I would just say it's probably a couple things one is that often if you just try to read the laws read the cases for the layperson it just doesn't make any sense it's very hard to understand so having summaries of those laws or some analysis about what it is in language that is more readable so it's like how like no oppressed those books and things like that it's you know gives just sort explains to you what what this case means what the statute means I think would be extremely helpful to a lot of people beyond that I think you know having different versions of the laws themselves that like the 2007 2005 2003 versions I think that helped you know sometimes a different session or different sort of years code actually applies to your particular situation I think that sort of just a given you know if you had a housing violation or some issue back in 2005 you'd want to be able to look up what law was in 2005 and then I think from a longer term thing from a policy standpoint being able to compare different states codes and statutes relatively easily online and having some law professors add commentary to it I think would be very helpful to people and sort of making their decisions and their policy decisions going forward and a follow-up Mr. Chair can you explain a little more about what the digital signature or MD5 arrangements that one of you referred to actually does how that works represented Rosenbaum mr. Chairman a digital signature is is something that is calculated by the publisher of a document and it's made available next to the document and a user is able to use a computer program that lets them know that this document has not been altered since it was initially published it's something that I actually instituted with securities and exchange commission documents when I was publishing those and that meant that an investor looking at an annual report if they cared to could verify that that document had not been changed it's the mechanism we use in software distribution when you download software for for your computer server you use these digital signatures to make sure that some bad guy hasn't replaced the software that you thought you were downloading with something else and so it's it's a tool available to the publisher for authenticity and it's something that a sophisticated user would know to look for yes sophisticated users and more importantly webmasters for example that got a copy of the statutes let's say from Tim Stanley and wanted to verify that Tim had not modified them since Oregon had published them a webmaster would certainly be able to use such a tool thank you thank you Richardson please thank you mr. Chair I have a comment and then a question you know we keep dancing around what this is really about this is about commerce and we talk about it's really about access and we want the public to have the choice but my understanding of what Justia does and and what internet companies do is they take access to information that hopefully will attract people to come to that's that the location that site and then they have ads that go along with it and hopefully people click on those ads and that'll generate income I mean it's about raising it let me just so I could just finish my thought and then I'd like to have you hear from me what you have to say we have a situation here where we're spending one point five million dollars to put into a format information that y'all would like to have so that you can use it to generate income without not by selling the item itself but by you know the whole process of using internet to generate income through ads and so forth and so the tension is the taxpayers pay one point five million dollars to make it into a format that will then generate money for companies that want to utilize it to generate income and that's you know that and I have nothing wrong with no problem with commerce but from what I'm hearing you say Mr. Olson and maybe you could address this over the years West Publishing has paid money for access to take statutes and so forth and in case law and print them and you know I from what I'm understanding what you're saying is that that what's all unnecessary because there's no no real change in the law there may have been interpretation by the Supreme Court in 1991 but they were interpreting what has already been the law and so over all these years has it been a senseless and unnecessary for West Publishing to be paying the states for access to the work that the taxpayers paid to put into a format that could be used by them to generate income and is that not essentially what we're talking about doing here in other words it's just a different format but you're trying to utilize public information in a way that will generate revenue for the companies and there's nothing wrong with that but isn't that what this is about and is there not you know was West Publishing doing something they didn't need to do based on your understanding that there should be no limitation on access to companies brought to utilize the law and in the format that it's been placed in by the legislative committees in the various states if I could represent a Richardson and Mr. Chairman there are commercial users and that we're very frank that there are people like Justia now they don't make money selling access to the law but they make money selling services to web firms my nonprofit organization on the other hand does distribute this to universities and to a large number of sites that are strictly non-commercial and I think a very important point to understand is that that while citizens need access to the law and that's partly while we're here so do lawyers and while many lawyers have access to West you would not believe how many phone calls I get from government lawyers public interest lawyers solo practitioners that just do not have access to the tools that they need and that's why we're so dedicated to putting free law online for anybody anybody to use and that partly means commercial users but a lot of what we're doing is strictly non-commercial and we're giving access to the law to people that have not been served by the high-priced commercial services and those include legal practitioners as well as as as individual citizens I just want to make one other point justia we're not running any ads on the organ codes or or the case law or in fact on any of the public research that's part of our site so we sell websites and blogs to law firms and certainly it helps us reputation only because we take the revenue produced we put up free information but we're not directly running ads there right now and we and we take whatever we have and we redistribute it for free in a the the programming rate the other self or any the other effort we put in we've been very good about taking those copies of it getting over the car or getting out the other people in formats that they can use an XML format some different things and trying to get out to everybody so I'm not saying I'm a you know obviously we're a business I don't they gave a stake about that but it hasn't been our goal it's not really gonna be a huge revenue generator the way I'm seeing it I'm think seeing as something that's distributed lots of different places and realistically it's more of a research tool longer term so I don't know if that helps if I may briefly address the issue that was raised by a couple of the members of the committee about the the public expense I think there's an analogy here to you know to signs on highway certainly the state undertakes significant expense in putting signs on the highway so that people can get from Portland to Salem but that that's not an expense that there's any anticipation of recovering and similarly here I mean the law and things like the annotations that's that's a road map to what the law is these annotations will are there they're not particularly original with respect and and I don't think they meet the test of feist but they do give practicing lawyers a way of telling whether a particular section has been overruled or declared unconstitutional without having to pay the significant expense that mr. Malamud just raised of you know I have a four lawyer firm we pay you know $2,300 a month to Lexis that's a lot of money so I think there is an issue here of presenting access of guaranteeing access to the public and well there is an expense involved in this I think that's what government that's what governments for for the questions so brown you have any questions thank you gentlemen thank you very much and thank you for coming to us from San Francisco I hope you enjoy your visit to the state of Oregon thank you really do