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Good News: California Legislature Dumps Stupid Plan To Copyright All Government Works

from the close-one dept

Thu, Jun 23rd 2016 3:39pm — Mike Masnick

Back in April, we noted that California Assemblymember Mark Stone was pushing some legislation to basically push California governments to copyright and trademark everything they could. This was a bad kneejerk response to the admittedly ridiculous situation in Yosemite, where the concessions vendor had trademarked various park names and then tried to hold them ransom. Of course, the proper response is to make sure that kind of thing can't be covered by trademark or copyright law, not push state government entities to lock up things under intellectual property laws.

Despite widespread criticism, the plan moved forward with only modest tweaks earlier this month. Thankfully, with the help of EFF pushing lots of people to speak out against the bill, it appears that the California legislature has basically dropped the proposal entirely. The amended bill looks very, very different. See all that red text? That's what's been removed:

That's basically all the bad stuff. What remains is basically a requirement that state agencies "consider" the intellectual property rights at issue when they're writing contracts -- which as EFF notes -- should more effectively deal with Yosemite-like situations, without the massive overkill of giving California government agencies copyrights and trademarks in everything.

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Filed Under: ab 2880, california, copyright, mark stone, trademark, yosemite

6 Comments

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Uriel-238 (profile), 23 Jun 2016 @ 4:30pm

To me it doesn't make sense for IP to fall into government hands...
...except to keep it all available to everyone as public domain works.

I can see trademarks of sufficiently complex emblems, maybe, so that a state agency seals, so that the mark can be used to indicate official correspondence. But other than that...no.
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JBDragon (profile), 23 Jun 2016 @ 5:19pm

All the Government stuff is paid for BY THE PEOPLE and anyone should be able to take any pictures and so with as they want with them. It all should be in the Public Domain right off the bat.
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- Wendy Cockcroft, 24 Jun 2016 @ 5:52am
  
  Re:
  Damn straight, JBDragon!
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Pixelation, 23 Jun 2016 @ 8:51pm

Perhaps...
we need to think this through more carefully. If they copyright the laws they write, I as a citizen, would be an owner and could sue them for using my copyrighted law. We could lock a ton of shitty law up this way.

Bring it on!
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- Wendy Cockcroft, 24 Jun 2016 @ 5:53am
  
  Re: Perhaps...
  In theory, yes. In practice, this isn't meant to benefit us peons.
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Whatever, 26 Jun 2016 @ 9:04pm

This is a travesty. Masnick and Wyden must be behind this. Disgusting lawbreakers.
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