[p2p-research] P2P law presentation and cleaning?

[M. Fioretti]

Hi,

probably several of you already know this guy, but here's an
initiative which, besides being good in itself, also has a potential
"p2p production" side:

"Carl Malamud... wants California -- and every other federal, state
and local agency -- to drop their copyright claims on law, contending
it will pave the way for innovators to create new ways of searching
and presenting laws."

Full story at:
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20080903/NEWS/809030309/1350&title=Getting_access__one_document_at_a_time

Related note/question/proposal: theoretically, having all those texts
online in an editable form would be great for producing
collaboratively, through a wiki, a much cleaner, understandable,
slimmer (=democratic?) corpus of laws. It would be the first step to
allow everybody to produce and propose:

- simpler texts of existing laws, ie formulations which have the same
  legal meaning of the current one but don't require a law degree and
  a pint of analgesics to understand them. Here in Italy we have
  several words which ONLY exist in the text of some laws...

- works that prove that a law is redundant/overlapping/
  obsolete/unapplicable or in plain contrast with other existing laws,
  making it much simpler to gather popular support for proposals to
  abolish, rewrite or improve that law

I even talked with a lawyer friend of mine last year because I'd have
liked to put together something like this in Italy, but the same
problem Malamud is fighting plus other complications and, of course,
lack of time, made the idea die almost immediately. Does something
like this already exist in other countries?

     Marco

-- 
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84