Note on Code Swaraj
could navigate them more effectively, and placed all the documents both on our site and on public access locations such as the Internet Archive.
The Internet Archive, in turn, as they do with all documents on their site, added even more utility to the documents, transforming them into ebook formats, exposing them to search engines such as Google so they could be easily found, allowing users to submit comments and reviews with even more information.
The standards bodies had not been amused and the litigation had been intense. In 2015, we underwent 23 days of legal depositions, three of those days were spent deposing me. For my deposition, each day consisted of 12-14 hours of questioning. On my side, there were four lawyers, on their side there were six lawyers, plus the stenographer and the videographer. The questioning was intense.
We lost in the District Court. The judge simply didn’t buy our argument. She agreed that these were all “the law” but said if Congress had wanted to say that these laws were not subject to copyright, they could have passed a law saying so. At one point the judge suggested we should be knocking on the doors of “the big white building up the hill” pointing in the direction of the U.S. Capitol.
We filed our notice of appeal in February, 2017, but things move slowly in the District of Columbia. It took a long time for the court to set a schedule. Finally, in August, we filed our brief, and at the end of September, our amicus briefs were filed. Our showing was very strong. In addition to the American Library Association and the American Association of Law Libraries, a huge number of eminent law professors and law librarians had joined in a brief from Public Knowledge.
Also signing on to that brief were an impressive number of former government officials, including Raymond Mosley, who ran the Office of the Federal Register for 18 years and both Public Printers of the United States appointed by President George W. Bush. The Office of the Federal Register works with the Government Publishing Office to produce the Official Journals of Government, including the Code of Federal Regulations. These were the people officially charged with promulgation of federal law and they were putting their names down in support of my efforts.
They were joined by my former boss John D. Podesta, as well as Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, and Dr. David Michaels, the former director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). All these
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