Code Swaraj
large books, a 763-pound shipment. With so many books, I had to buy more bookcases, but it was well worth it!
Course Cases Clamoring For Attention
My core task in November was tending to the court cases. First up was India. We had filed a public interest litigation suit in December 2015 in the High Court of Delhi. In India, one typically brings suit against two parties: the agency in question (in this case the Bureau of Indian Standards) and the Government of India itself. The Bureau had failed to respond, but finally after some cajoling from the Court, in June of 2016, they filed a response to our suit. The Union Government, however, repeatedly failed to respond. Not only did they fail to respond, they failed to turn up in Court.
The lawyers from the firm of Nishith Desai had gone through this cycle several times, each time appearing in court only to find the government had failed to send anybody. In fact, even the Bureau had not shown up at first. I remember one call I got from India after such an appearance. The lawyers told me that somebody had in fact shown up for the other side, but the Court had asked him if he was representing BIS or the Union Government. He didn’t know, so he was sent back to find out who his client was.
On November 13th, we had another hearing. This was the fourth time the Union Government had been asked to respond, and evidently four times is the magic number. The Court ruled that the response from the Bureau would also serve as the response from the Union Government, and an oral argument was ordered for February 27, 2018. This was exciting. After two years of paperwork and procedures, we were finally ready to get our case heard on the merits.
That afternoon, I caught a plane for Atlanta, Georgia for the second case. In this one, the State of Georgia had me accused of practicing a “form of terrorism” because I had posted the Official Code of Georgia Annotated on the Internet for anybody to read without charge. The State felt this violated their copyright. I had sent numerous letters to the Speaker of the Georgia Assembly explaining why, in the United States, the law has no copyright because the law is owned by the people, but my explanations had not held much sway with the authorities.
Now let us be clear. Every single act in the Georgia legislature begins with these words: “An Act. To Amend the Official Code of Georgia Annotated.” There is only one official law of Georgia and this was it. Copyright was in the name of
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