<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/05/germany-still-locking-up-some-laws-behind-copyright/>
"It is often said that “ignorance of the law is no defense.” But the corollary
of this statement is that laws must be freely available so that people can find
them, read them and obey them. Secret laws, or laws that are hard to access,
undermine the ability and thus the willingness of citizens to follow them. And
yet just such a situation is found in many countries around the world,
including Germany, as a post on the
Communia blog by Judith Doleschal from
the FragDenStaat (“Ask the Government”) organization describes. It concerns
what are known as “law gazettes.” These are crucial documents that define
German regulations for a wide range of areas such as work safety, health
insurance tariffs, directives on the use of police tasers or guidelines for
pesticide applications. They are not primary legislation, but they are
nonetheless legally binding, which means that they should be freely available
to anyone who might have to obey them. They are not, for reasons explained by
Doleschal:
The [German] Federal Ministry of the Interior is the editor of the gazette.
However, it is published by a private publishing house owned by the
billion-dollar Wolters Kluwer group. Wolters Kluwer charges €1.70 per 8
pages for individual copies of the documents. If you were to buy all
official issues of the [Federal Gazette of Ministerial Orders] with a
total of 63,983 pages individually from the publisher, it would cost a
whopping €13,596.
Given the healthy profits such pricing presumably generates from material that
is provided by the German government, the publisher is naturally unwilling to
allow anyone else to provide free access to these official documents. The
reason why it can do that is interesting:
[The publisher] doesn’t hold the copyright to the official documents.
Instead, it argues that the database of the law gazette is protected under
related rights („Leistungsschutzrecht“ in German)."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
