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Citing the Veeck decision (7 June ’02), Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.Org have posted the building, fire, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical Public Safety Codes for the state of California. In itself, this may excite a handful of people, but the following statement makes its importance clear:

The courts have long held that the law is public domain and must be available to all for use without restriction. While numerous organizations have attempted to assert copyright over judicial branch opinions, legislative branch statutes, and executive branch regulations, the courts have not looked kindly on these efforts to place a private wrapper around a public package. If we are to be a nation of laws, those laws must be accessible to all.

The Cal PSC documents are available “in bulk” here.

Ongoing and archived projects include gao.gov (now the “Government Accountability Office,” courtesy of 43, for whom the term implies guilt), house.gov, justice.gov, si.edu (a/k/a the Smithsonian Institution), uscourts.gov, copyright.gov, itu.int, oregon.gov, sec.gov, and uspto.gov.

Public.Resource.Org’s “paper trail” of selected correspondence:

As a de facto standard, the decision to publish pdfs of the correspondence makes sense—but “Scribd”? About which one observer has written:

I call bullshit. … If anything they are locking things up by placing it in their own jackass format. Please, scribd, tell us all what exactly was wrong with text? Or PDFs? Why exactly are we supposed to embrace your closed-source, proprietary standard? One, because it is so jacked up, makes it invisible to all search engines, including Google? Now please stop pissing off the Internet and go bankrupt already.