School of Information professors Pam Samuelson and Brian Carver were on a panel about intellectual property and the law at the Berkeley/SOMA Law.Gov Workshop yesterday, co-convened by Mitch Kapor and Pam Samuelson.
This Law.Gov workshop was the latest in a series of workshops organized across the country by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org. The Law.Gov effort seeks to document the feasibility of creating a distributed registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.
This workshop focused in particular on two important issues:
Privacy: A series of audits of federal appellate and district court documents has demonstrated that there are significant problems in application of the rules of privacy to actual practice. In addition to application of existing rules, this session examined whether new rules and practices are needed when privacy through obscurity is not practiced and documents become significantly more widely available. This session was led by Peter Winn, assistant United States attorney with the Department of Justice, and Chris Hoofnagle of the UC Berkeley School of Law.
Intellectual property: The session led by Professors Samuelson and Carver examined the issue of assertions of copyright over primary legal materials by public or private actors. Despite an apparently clear set of court opinions dating back to 1834, a number of states assert copyright over statutes and other legal materials. This session examined federal and state policies on distribution of primary legal materials and highlighted the innovations that would be enabled by a widely-available repository of all United States primary legal materials, unfettered by such copyright claims.
Video of the workshop is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8zdCXPk5Ks.