Tom MacWright

Recently

2013-05-09T00:00:00-07:00

Consumption

The Macintosh Project Selected Papers – this was the best read this month. The dialog between Jobs, Woz, and Raskin is incredible, and their ideas – whether it’s more important to be cheap or powerful, how to de-nerd computing, even how the value of computers relates to their place on the network.

We don’t think of the telephone company primarily as a manufacturer of the little $40 things with dials or pushbuttons that we have in our homes and on our desks. The implications of this proposal, at one extreme, is that Apple will be seen, in the future, not so much as a builder of hardware, but as a purveyor of a service that interpenetrates the telephone network, and provides information.

‘The Apple Computer Network’, Jeff Raskin, 11 Sept 1979

Bezier Curves – A Primer
An Interview With Alan Kay
Transcript of Secret Meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt
How Selections Work by Mike Bostock
Listening: Way Yes – Tog Pebbles

Elsewhere

I gave the first presentation about the DC Code project at Transparency Camp, to a room of people way more knowledgeable about legislation and open data than myself. In a session at the ‘unconference’, I wrote dccode.org/simple, a no-css, no-javascript version of the code, which is another experiment in accessibility and simplicity. It’s generated by a tiny node.js script

We re-released mapbox.js based on Leaflet, redesign the MapBox tour, and pulled together some important architectural changes that’ll make it easier to move faster.

iD is now the default editor on OpenStreetMap and it’s working pretty well. Lots of challenges left, and some of the more ‘fun’ performance optimizations are ahead of us. We blogged its development on /osmdev.

I wrote lodebuilder, an online tool to make a particular kind of loading background that I first used in iD and seems to be quite applicable elsewhere. (name inspiration)

I immediately used it for my mistakes.io project, which added the ability to save anonymous Gists with Cmd-S.

I polished up and gave a domain name to one of my simplest and most straightforward projects, now called debugbrowser.com. It simply documents opening developer extensions in all browsers.

A Sunday & An Open DC Code

2013-04-16T00:00:00-07:00

prefix: This is a follow-up to The Open Code, which came after a series of posts including access vs ownership, you cannot have the code, public domain, and more. Eric Mill also wrote about this hackathon over at the Sunlight Foundation.

This weekend I hosted a meeting at the MapBox offices to hack on the newly released, open and downloadable version of the DC Code. The DC Code is all of the codified laws in DC, and this is the first time that so-called ‘tech types’ had the opportunity to actually grab it, look inside, and see what we can do.

In the past, I’ve been opposed to hackathons, not only because the term summons Red Bull, pizza, and premature optimization, but that they lay bare the problems of the so-called ‘do-ocracy’ – that contributing is always an equation of ability, communication, and access, and one that doesn’t always work.

We ran /openlawdc as an open organization on GitHub. I hand out access to anyone who asks, and everyone is an owner. This means anyone can contribute to anything in that space, and people can create new repositories for any reason. We started with a big codepad that everyone had access to and was pre-populated with tasks, questions, and links. Tasks for non-technical users are incredibly important. Carl Malamud, who was instrumental in raising public awareness of this issue and is a leader in understanding how to make closed open, donated bagels, lox, and more, which was delivered by Alex Howard, who also provided important publicity. Also a massive thanks to Ari Greenwood, who wrote about this event in Huff Post DC Around Town.

The Council handled this incredibly well: V. David Zvenyach of the Office of the General Counsel attended, introduced the council’s input, and was absolutely key in explaining both technical, narrow issues and much larger ones – he even created a new repository to explain one of the largest challenges facing the council.

As a result, we got a lot done: tens of commits and four new contributors to the browser project, a new home-rule-act project with three contributors including Josh Tauberer and Harlan Yu, a legal-dictionary spinoff of State Decoded by Waldo Jaquith, and a DC Code importer branch of State Decoded by Bill Hunt.

Basically, as the saying goes: rough consensus and running code

The code browser project that I started to test my parser grew a lot, and shows real potential as an option. But I’m mainly excited for the code getting into The State Decoded and about the growth of small, targeted code like Eric Mill’s citation project, which detects and links legal citations like § 1101-1103.

Up Next

Besides ‘lots of code’ I think there’s some more interesting stuff to note here and to think of as the future.

I’ve really wanted to push past the kneejerk reactions of the computer-native to the law and instead make a focus on understanding the system, eccentricities and all. I think that’s happening, and in a really good way: the things we started working on on Sunday are pragmatic, usable tools that make specific progress in the law possible. For instance, referencing older laws isn’t just a problem for lawyers, it’s a timesuck for lawmakers. And simple functionalities like printing out longer sections of the Code are impossible on LexisNexis’s new portal but eminently doable on browser.

And even with these tools as a simple alternative to commerical portals, we’re making it abundantly clear: open data lets people make the change they want.

The Open Code

2013-04-04T00:00:00-07:00

tl;dr: thanks to good people, we now have an unencumbered digital copy of dc’s laws. let’s meet april 14th in washington, dc to realize the massive potential of this

I couldn’t be happier to write that the project to bring DC’s laws into the digital era and put them in everyone’s hands made a big breakthrough: today you can download an unofficial copy of the Code (current through December 11, 2012) from the DC Council’s website. Not only that, but the licensing for this copy is officially CC0, a Creative Commons license that aims to be a globally-effective Public Domain designation.

A lot of people made this possible: Ben Bryant was extremely understanding through more than 50 emails over more than four months, Carl Malamud made the brilliant move of digitizing and distributing the code, declaring DC’s copyright invalid. Josh Tauberer made the vital contact with V David Zvenyach, who together cleaned files delivered by WestLaw in accordance to H.11.1 of the contract. And many journalists took the time to understand the issue, speak clearly, and make this a reality.

A massive thanks to everyone involved.

There are a few things that this isn’t: it isn’t the official copy of the code, and lawyers would be ill-advised to cite it alone. It isn’t up-to-date – the council is fast-moving and this is just a snapshot. In time we’ll fix these problems too.

And so the floodgates are open – now that we have the raw data, so many applications of this information are possible. I propose we meet April 14th in Washington, DC to realize the massive potential of this.

What else is there to build? A great smartphone interface. Topic-specific bookmarks. Text analysis. Great, instant search. Mirrored archives to everywhere. Printable copies for DIY and for print-on-demand services. And lots more.

We’re not waiting till then to start though: dc-decoded is a project I started today to finish the long-awaited task of bringing DC’s laws into The State Decoded. The openlawdc organization on GitHub is dedicated to working on these problems, and it’s open: you can and should get access if you want to contribute.

Recently

2013-04-01T00:00:00-07:00

This month I made ration, which rations items in intervals. GPSTile does pretty OSM GPS tiles. osm-auth auths osm, osm-live-map is a live map of osm. osm-stream provides it with streaming data. an ironic entry to the 100 lines or less contest to use Esri’s ‘trade secret’ Javascript API. A nice browser for OSM tracing imagery. basicrequest does super-simple ajax. leaflet-pip does points in polygons in Leaflet. I’ve been using browserify a lot, and it’s making tiny modular Javascript components like those in osmlab possible.

The Code

This was a big, big month for the DC Code, thanks to Carl Malamud, who did the heavy lifting, scanning, OCRing, ordering, and so on to get the code from paper to PDF and even a bit to text. There’s so much more to do, but having real and available files for these pages that have occupying so much of my mind for months feels like the start of something.

There are more photos on Flickr, a unboxing on Vimeo, and, of course, the PDF-format code as a bulk download on Public.Resource.org.

Elsewhere

DC’s Laws Aren’t Yours on Greater Greater Washington
Quietly Announcing osmlab on talk@openstreetmap

Soon

Listening

Ava Luna, Doseone, darkhalo, Young Rapids' Day Light Savings, Snowden’s The Beat Comes.

Reading

Thinking

when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. – _why

this is the quote of the last two years.

One of the most satisfying experiences in this industry of making short lived things is when you make an idea that lives beyond the first implementation. Like books written in dead languages and read in living ones, or a million similar versions of the same clever design for bike lights. There are a few instances of this I really like – how certain ‘recent inventions’ like Atkinson dithering or Perlin noise can seem like fundamental algorithms despite being quite young.

Clean APIs aren’t easy, easy APIs aren’t clean. The clearest example I can see here is syntax sugar: methods only a line or two long that give a concept a name. A markers API that provides a single .features() call has the same power as one with clearMarkers(), addMarker(), removeMarker(), and so on – but connecting the one-line-of-course-code dot not only enables naïve developers who don’t know Javascript (there are many), but it also plays into a desire to have a single method-per-thought-concept. Those in the know understand that there are a handful of core concepts and you can have a complete system with a tiny API – but the concepts that APIs need to worry about are the ones users think are atomic, not those that are atomic.

What is easy is what is familiar. Familiarity is the most underrated usability factor. And what’s familiar is what is learned early.

Always demonstrate the potential of abstracted ideas. While it’s very useful in programming terms to write code that does on this perfectly and is completely tested and extremely useful for some certain case, a lot of people don’t know what that case is. Show them – demonstrate the ‘art of the possible’ by creating an example for absolutely every thing you make. Sometimes I think we’ve done this right – the mapbox.js examples just grow and grow, and Mike Bostock’s little experiments are the raw ingredients of most d3js hacks.

The thing about big libraries and frameworks is that the availability of an ‘app for that’ or a ‘method for that’ soon becomes a dictate that ‘if there’s a method for that in that library, you must use it’. Case in point should be jQuery, which introduced an honestly web-changing selector engine and monadic API, coupled with a lackluster and not-recommend $.each method. But a lot of jQuery programmers used it for selectors and felt guilty using for() loops when there was a ‘library way’ of doing them, so went the $.each route. Use the library when it’s better, not just because it’s available.

Math for Pictures

2013-03-05T00:00:00-08:00

Here’s the small subset of math that I use for the vast majority of visualizations – ideally it’s a good introduction to those who want to make pretty things with d3js, canvas, or other tools.

In essence, I’ll try to explain four parts of Javascript’s built-in Math object:

Math.cos(a), which we use to get x positions from angles
Math.sin(a), which we use to get y positions from angles
Math.atan2(y, x), which turns x, y positions back into angles
Math.PI, which we use to convert radians to degrees and back, and use for the angles in a circle

Of course, each of these parts is usable for much, much more – but let’s start here.

Radians

As a preface, let’s get confortable with the units that these functions take: radians. The degree angles in a circle go from 0° to 360°. In the land of radians, that’s 0 radians to 2π radians. So, halfway around is π and 90° is π/2.

Core Math functions use radians exclusively. For code that bridges the gap and accepts degrees as input, you’ll usually see a chunk like this, that defines D2R and R2D, which convert radians R to degrees D and back again.

Math.sin & Math.cos

Before diving in to Math.sin() and Math.cos(), let’s think quickly about what they are.²

Math.sin() and Math.cos() are functions that take one numeric argument and return a numeric value. While you can give them any number and they’ll give a value, the values repeat every 2 * Math.PI, because that’s their wavelength.

Sine, Cosine, and Unit Circles

Many visualizations are composed of circles, circle fitting, or ‘radial’ layouts. For instance, this geometry daily redo, as well as this one, and this one, and this one – all circle-based.

To just draw circles, SVG has a circle element. But it’s more important to reason about them – to know that, at a certain angle, where is a point on a circle.

This is where Math.sin() and Math.cos() jump in.¹

The fundamental circle you can draw with the functions is a unit circle: a circle with a radius of 1. (and thus a diameter of 2) Once you make a unit circle, it’s easy to scale it up or down.

In terms of a unit circle, using Math.sin() and Math.cos() is simple: the sine function generates y coordinates, and cosine generates x coordinates.

We call it a unit circle because the distance from the center to each point is 1.

Both functions take as an argument an angle in radians, and return a number which you can interpret as a distance from the center of the circle. The center of the circle, for a unit circle, is at the coordinate 0, 0, and so it radiates outwards to 1 and -1 in x and y dimensions.

One of the classic tricks with sine, cosine, and so on is the pattern:

sine: opposite / hypotenuse
cosine: adjacent / hypotenuse
tangent: adjacent / adjacent

These make a lot of sense in this context if you think of a triangle radiating out of a unit circle, and since the hypotenuse is always equal to 1, sine and cosine simply provide the values of opposite and adjacent sides.

Radial Shapes from Circles

With this basic knowledge, you can draw other kinds of shapes as well.

Here’s an equilateral triangle, drawn by choosing three angles – 0°, 120°, and 240°, from a unit circle. Besides just being an easy way to compute this, you also know that this triangle will be inscribed in a circle made from the same formula.

Here’s a square, made the exact same way, which you can also guarantee is inscribed in a circle of radius 90.

So: in this narrow usage of trigonometry, sine and cosine are used to go from angles into coordinates. How do you go back?

atan2 and Angles

Let’s do the opposite: going from coordinates to angles. Doing this is useful for a number of reasons – like if you have a ‘dial’ control in which the user can drag a circular UI element, and you want to know what angle they’re currently dragging it to. Or if you have existing data and you want to do something that requires working with the angles from a → b → c, like my running map.

Sine, cosine, and tangent have inverse versions: arcsine, arctan, and arccos – but they’re not that convenient. Why? Because, while an angle going into sine and cosine will give you a point in x & y, giving arcsine a y coordinate and arccos an x coordinate is not enough, because there’s no one-to-one mapping – the point x=0 could be at the the top of the sphere or at the bottom, and arccos doesn’t know.

In school, you would learn how to figure out what quadrant the point is in, and use a different little equation for each. Luckily there’s some new math:

atan2 is awesome: it takes a coordinate and gives you the angle to it, and handles the quadrant problem internally. The only catch is that atan2 takes arguments in an atypical y, x order.

Here’s an example of looping this around – this uses Math.atan2 to find the angle from a point a picture to the mouse position, and then draws a line at that angle using Math.cos and Math.sin:

atan2 is the goldmine that made my running map possible and sparked this renewed fascination with math.

Recently

2013-03-03T00:00:00-08:00

February was a busy month. My mind was split between new projects, dc, refueling a big project, and working on a big one.

Listening

Metazoa by Buke and Gase

Buke and Gase – General Dome – ‘Hard Times’ was the song of the month.
Atoms for Peace – AMOK – Thom Yorke hijinks and Flea minus RHCP. Quality album.
Yo La Tengo – Fade – plus seeing them in-concert at the 9:30 Club
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down – We the Common and Emancipator’s Dusk to Dawn – both by fellow William & Mary grads.

Plus reviewing four tracks to follow-up Teen Mom’s album, Mean Tom

Watching

got a twine and a leap and I need to learn more

Away From Keyboard is fantastic. I expected it to be a bit over the top or poorly produced, but it’s really a quality piece of film and journalism.

Reading

Quite a bit. I posted about the DC Code’s compilation, process, copyright status, propriety, and access, so there’s been a lot to learn.

A few highlights:

Tear Down this (Pay)Wall
Clickwrap and Browse wrap – two of the important elements of the problems with the DC Code
No Law – a great text about copyright law
ProCD vs. Zeidenberg – a court case establishing the validity of click-wrap and its ability to override copyright
Summaries of Fair Use Cases – since fair use is per-case, this gives good examples of how those cases have gone.
A Short Lesson in Perspective – depressing and valid
Google Invades
Peter Thiel’s Infantile Culture
Fix the Law to Fix America

Elsewhere

Presented on d3.js at the DC jQuery Meetup. First presentation using tributary.io and mistakes.
Copyedited and illustrated a blog post series by John Firebaugh: 1, 2, 3.

The Code: Access vs. Ownership

2013-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

My previous article about the inaccessibility of complete copies of the DC Code was read and commented on pretty widely. I hope that it was a useful introduction to an important issue, but it’s evident that some of it needs more explicit explanation.

The first is the difference between access and ownership.

Quite a few people posted a link to Westlaw’s portal that gives you access to the law, and asked – if you can get the law here, what’s the problem?

The problem is that you can’t have a a complete, digital, public-domain copy, despite the code being technically and legally public domain.

The West portal is neither copyright-free or nor copyable, and West has gone to great lengths to guarantee those things.

Since the portal has West’s copyright embedded and a Terms of Service that restricts automated copying, there is no other complete, online copy of the code. This means that we’re reliant on West as the sole provider of the code and the portal. So it’s both a single point of failure, and a single source with no competitors. The inadequacy of the portal, like its inability to be linked to, or to allow anonymous browsing, isn’t avoidable: it’s the only option, by design.

the constitution

This is the US Constitution. The original version is in the National Archives and is very important. If someone spilled ink on it, or accidentally burned it, everyone would be angry. But we would not lose the content of the constitution.

This is because there are many copies. And how can there be copies? Because of the public domain, and simple, unfettered access to the text.

Here’s a printable constitution. Here’s a $1 pocket constitution. And copyleft images on Flickr, and public domain images on WikiMedia.

constitutionbooklet.com

You can download the constitution as a PDF, or as a Word file, or as a database. You can also do interesting things with it – text analysis, art pieces, and so on – you can also just store it away, just in case you need it or you expect the original to eventually yellow and crinkle.

It is fair to say that the ownership of the Constitution is yours.

Compare this to a copyrighted work. A streaming television show is available to millions of people, but, barring illegal activity, there are no privately-held copies. It is like a text behind glass – you can view it, but the owner can take it away whenever they want. There’s a fundamental and practical difference: you can play an Elvis record even if the recording company and the artist is long gone, but if Spotify goes offline tomorrow, your ‘streaming collection’ is no longer. Copies matter.

On the surface this may seem like a detail or something that only programmers really want. But it’s quite important.

This ownership of a complete, legally-free text is the difference between the DC Code being available widely and it being extremely restricted. A widely available code could be distributed in free pamphlets, in smartphone applications for citizens and in every police car’s laptop. It could be analyzed for changes so that citizens can subscribe to passages and know if they need to adjust to new bike laws, gun laws, or restrictions on how they manage their business. Or it can be included in a country-wide system for open codes like The State Decoded.

Without that, it’s available in a single, sub-par portal and hardcover books and CDs that you can’t legally copy.

Beyond the present day, the ability to copy the text is the difference between being able to archive versions in forward-looking systems like Archive.org. It’s the difference between the council being able to build an in-house system for backup versus being dependent on a contractor with uncertain backup plans and future stability.

So: the code in the public domain, like the Constitution. But it is managed more like a copyrighted work, because we cannot get complete, digital copies of it.

You Cannot Have the DC Code

2013-02-20T00:00:00-08:00

printed

addendum: The problem is acquiring a public domain digital copy of the code, not about accessing the code: it's accessible online. Read access vs ownership, a followup, for more information

You cannot have a digital copy of the DC Code. You cannot have a public domain version of the code, despite it being legally public domain.

The Code is the ‘compiled law’ of the District of Columbia: gun laws, bike laws, election rules, and most everything else.

The DC Government does not have a digital copy of the DC Code that it can give you, even if you ask nicely. It does not have a copy for itself, beside hardcover books and copyrighted CDs that it can’t legally copy or crack. There’s no clear backup plan if a contractor’s lights go off or server farm goes down – while a contract requires them to have backups, there’s no guarantee.

cc-by-na AJ Ashton

The DC government can’t make a pocket copy of the code, or a smartphone app to better inform policemen, because it doesn’t have a copyright-free copy. Open source developers can’t make better data portals for the code because they don’t either.

The refrain from open-government advocates is that one should ‘ask for a copy’.

You cannot. There is no-one to ask who can give you one and who wants to. The government only has copyright-infected copies, and the contractor has no reason to endanger their information monopoly.

To preclude misunderstandings: this is not a failure of the Council itself. It has nothing to do with the drama around councilmembers or the DC government’s problems.

The Council composes and publishes its bills and makes every effort at transparency: this is a failure of the last step, in which the bill is compiled and de-facto owned by a private contractor.

This is not a question of hacking or technology. Writing a scraper for the portal is an afternoon project, but is illegal, and can be construed as a felony by the federal government.

clause from the 2012 Contract with West

This is a failure of the public/private contracting system and the government’s ability to write strong and precise contracts that are geared for the internet era.

This is a failure of Westlaw and LexisNexis. It’s possibly a reiteration of a well-known court case focused on their previous attempt to do the same thing: monetize what should be a basic unit of democracy.

Next up: how this is possible, what it means, and how we can fix it.

Literate Jenks Natural Breaks and How The Idea Of Code is Lost

2013-02-18T00:00:00-08:00

Consider Jenks Natural Breaks Optimization.

try an interactive version of this

It’s a way to cut up data values into discrete categories. For instance, a choropleth map of poverty rates is cut into nine buckets which each have a different color. Different scales are useful for different kinds of data – you might use a linear scale, log scale, quantile, or so on.

Jenks is an algorithm designed specifically for this case that tries to maximize the similarity of numbers in groups while maximizing the distance between the groups. It tends to look good and be easily understood, so it’s popular. It’s in ArcGIS, QGIS, and lots of other tools for maps and statistics. It’s in university lectures and textbooks.

Mystery Ports of Ports

There’s a standard algorithm we use for Jenks, with existing ports in in Javascript, Python, and in Java and Fortran.

Notice anything about these linked scripts?

Every implementation I could find of Jenks is a port from Fortran IV, with the same terrible variable names, no comments, and absolutely no evidence that the porting author knew absolutely anything about what the code was doing.

Let’s be clear: the algorithms we use for Jenks are directly ported from an algorithm that accepted punch cards, documented in a paper composed and published on a typewriter.

It’s not clear who renamed the matrices (originally OP and LC) to mat1 and mat2, but that naming stuck and sucks. The Javascript ports don’t just taste like Fortran, but Python too – zeros are initialized as 0.0 as if the language had an integer type, and have about half comma-free style.

And this is not quibbling about style: the Wikipedia article about Jenks natural breaks describes an algorithm entirely unlike these ones. There’s no mention of dynamic-programming matrices, and there’s no hint in the implementations of something like the ‘sum of deviations between classes.’ Of course, there are no comments in any of the ports, so it’s hard to tell.

The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field. – Alan Kay

But on the other hand, how could they know?

Bill Morris

George F. Jenks proposed jenks natural breaks in his 1977 article entitled ‘Optimal Data Classification for Choropleth Maps’.

This article isn’t available online, or in print. As far as I can tell, it has never been digitized. It’s ostensibly still owned by the University of Kansas Geography Department, so the copy that Bill Morris was kind enough to scan and share I can’t safely post. Even if the university doesn’t assert copyright, because Professor Jenks passed in 1996, it’ll be copyrighted in his name until 2072.

Bother your senator today about copyright term limits.

And so we have history in the oddest terms. The idea is lost but the Fortran code is resurrected in a new language every few years, along with a link to the last link to the unreachable text.

Jenks in simple-statistics

I spent a day reading the original text and decoding as much as possible of the code’s intention, so that I could write a ‘literate’ implementation. My definition of literate is highly descriptive variable names, detailed and narrative comments, and straightforward code with no hijinks.

So: yes, this isn’t the first implementation of Jenks in Javascript. And it took me several times longer to do things this way than to just get the code working.

But the sad and foreboding state of this algorithm’s existing implementations said that to think critically about this code, its result, and possibilities for improvement, we need at least one version that’s clear about what it’s doing.

simple-statistics, my library for literate, beginner-friendly statistics, now has a literate implementation of Jenks natural breaks. In the process of understanding the implementation, I found that the matrix system is a sort of dynamic programming that cleverly solves all breaks from 1-k when you request k breaks. Thus my implementation breaks it into two parts – creating the matrices and pulling a solution out of them.

It’s in Javascript. A lot of smart geospatial code has been in Python or C++, with only a recent trend toward JS. I don’t see this as mattering much, since it’s a basic mathematical algorithm – not exactly a chance to use language features. But Javascript is fast, as in, the V8 engine is fast. In basic benchmarks, it’s 12x faster than a Python implementation. As Bill Mill points out, PyPy is on par with Javascript and there are a few other tweaks that improve performance, but it’s interesting that CPython is so slow at computationally-heavy, repetitive work.

Conclusion

Try out Jenks in simple-statistics. If the assortment of other algorithms included make you feel like you should create a new ‘micro library’, you can also just use the jenks implementation as a standalone. Please don’t delete the comments: if you need compression, use uglify-js as a separate step.

And so here’s a literate implementation of Jenks natural breaks in Javascript. If you can, please help to improve it by making the implementation more explanatory.

If you’re an academic, take this as a cautionary lesson to promote the free distribution of your work – if not now, for the future. If you’re a coder, consider whether the abstraction of software can be misused to mask ignorance of basic principles.

State Law is Public Domain. What's Public Domain?

2013-02-14T00:00:00-08:00

Last time we talked about how the law is compiled in Washington, DC, by a combination of district employees drafting bills which are ‘changesets’ to the law, which are applied to the law by contractors. The end result is that the district itself does not hold a complete, copyright-free digital copy of the law – it is only held by the company they pay. Let’s discuss why this is a problem: is the law free in the first place, and what does free mean?

Federal and state laws are in the public domain: they cannot be copyrighted.

Copyright is a legal concept of exclusive rights: a copyright owner can decide to sell copies or licenses of ‘the work’, like music, text, or art. They can also let others use the work and declare how they want to be credited.

They can also use a copyleft license to free the work to some degree – they still own the copyright but allow others to copy it as if it isn’t copywritten. Familiar forms of copyleft are Creative Commons licenses and open source licenses like the GPL and BSD licenses.

The Mona Lisa(s) are Public Domain

Public domain is lack of copyright: there are no intellectual property rights for public domain works. That means you can sell copies of the Mona Lisa or Hamlet or operate a site like Project Gutenberg that gives away free public domain books. Public domain is a stronger form of freedom than copyleft. The copyright holder does not cede or license specific rights by their own volition: there is no copyright holder.

Edicts of government, such as judicial opinions, administrative rulings, legislative enactments, public ordinances, and similar official legal documents are not copyrightable for reasons of public policy. This applies to such works whether they are Federal, State, or local as well as to those of foreign governments.

Compendium II: Copyright Office Practices 206.01

State laws cannot be copyrighted, because the US Government intelligently realizes that it’s important that citizens can access them freely, and copyright usually restricts distribution.

For instance, I can technically sell you a copy of Florida’s laws and make a profit off of it. And you can make a copy of that copy, and, in turn, make a profit off of that. And your friend can buy a copy, use it as a texture in their art piece, without asking anyone’s permission or giving anyone credit.

This is separate from the idea that ‘government works’ are public domain, which both excludes the District of Columbia (and Puerto Rico), and can be circumvented by using contractors to do work. ‘Works prepared by an officer or employee of the u.s. Government as part of that person’s official duties’ does not apply to employees of a company contracted to do a ground survey or study for the government: they can copyright their work.

Image: Law Library in Old Supreme Court (public domain image)

Tom MacWright

Recently

Consumption

Elsewhere

A Sunday & An Open DC Code

Up Next

The Open Code

Recently

The Code

Elsewhere

Soon

Listening

Reading

Thinking

Math for Pictures

Radians

Math.sin & Math.cos

Sine, Cosine, and Unit Circles

Radial Shapes from Circles

atan2 and Angles

Further Reading

Recently

Listening

Watching

Reading

Elsewhere

The Code: Access vs. Ownership

You Cannot Have the DC Code

Literate Jenks Natural Breaks and How The Idea Of Code is Lost

Mystery Ports of Ports

Jenks in simple-statistics

Conclusion

State Law is Public Domain. What's Public Domain?