2007 California Building Code Available For Free
The Public.Resource.Org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to making the governing laws of the U.S.A. available to the public that those laws apply to. As they point out here, there are numerous companies that profit greatly by making these documents available (West Law, Lexis Nexis), but at a high cost. It is the opinion of Public.Resource.Org that these laws, court decisions, codes belong to the people and therefore should be freely available to the people, not “locked up behind a cash register.” And this isn’t uncharted waters, either as pointed out below:
In Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress, 293 F.3d 791, the United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, met en banc “because of the novelty and importance of the issues” presented before the court:
“The issue in this en banc case is the extent to which a private organization may assert copyright protection for its model codes, after the models have been adopted by a legislative body and become ‘the law’. Specifically, may a code-writing organization prevent a website operator from posting the text of a model code where the code is identified simply as the building code of a city that enacted the model code as law?”
In an exhaustive opinion that carefully traced the reasons why our laws must be public, the Honorable Chief Judge Edith H. Jones stated the conclusion of the court:
“Our short answer is that as law, the model codes enter the public domain and are not subject to the copyright holder’s exclusive prerogatives.”
So without further ado, please take the time to download the full set of the 2007 California Building Code, made available by Carl Malamud of the Public.Resource.Org as a gift to the public in honor of this country’s Declaration of Independence.
P.S. - Laws cannot be copyrighted.
5 July 2008 | Construction, Construction and Law, General, Litigation | Comments
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