Last week, as part of EFF’s annual Copyright Week, we wrote about the need for transparency in creating copyright restrictions in the international arena. As a current legal battle shows, however, it is equally important that copyright restrictions not interfere with transparency and open access to the law itself. In a democracy, no one owns the law—or to put it another way, everyone owns the law. If a judge claimed that she should be paid a toll every time someone copied a passage from one of her decisions, we would find it absurd. If the lobbyist who wrote sections of your city’s business code announced he could decide, at any time, to sharply limit public access to those sections, he would be run out of town. The right to read the law—and just as important, the right to copy, discuss, and share the law—is essential to the rule of law itself. But six huge industry associations are trying to undermine that principle, insisting that it…
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