Oregon Legal Research Blog
If you are following this dispute (and I last posted about it here), you might want to do a little reading about copyright, the history of commercial and official legal publishing, and vendor neutral citation (yes, all of these are entertwined) – unless you want to sound ill-informed (or worse) when you Comment about the issue on the various blogs and news sites that are running stories about this dispute.
1) For fun, start with Bound by Law, the copyright comic book by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins.
2) A very interesting, provocative, and readable article: “Neutral Citation, Court Web Sites, and Access to Authoritative Case Law, by Peter Martin, 99 Law Library Journal 339 (Spring 2007) will give you an idea how much and how long these issues have been debated. (Quite a few of the articles in this issue are equally provocative, including an update to one of my favorites: “Why Do We Ask the Same Questions: The Triple Helix Dilemma Revisited,” by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.)
3) See also, Ken Svengalis, Legal Information Buyer’s Guide & Information Manual, for a brief history of legal publishing (and much, much more).
4) You might be curious to know how other countries manage their government copyright. Here, for example, is the United Kingdom’s Crown Copyright webpage and here is the Wikipedia Crown Copyright entry.
5) The U.S. Copyright Office.
6) There is not enough space in this post to list even the best print and online resources written about copyright, creative commons, public domain, fair use, infringement, and all the other copyright issues. You can toss these words into a search engine, but don’t forget, there are centuries of history, debate, law, money, and blood intertwined throughout, so stop in a library that has books on these subjects and spend some time reading, and reading, and thinking, and reading.