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It should not be legal to incorporate proprietary standards into law.


At least in the US, it's fairly hard to outlaw changing laws in certain ways since the people with the power to pass new laws are equally able to change past ones, including the ones that limit their power. The way to do something like this would be to put it in the Constitution, which isn't able to be changed through legislation alone, but it seems that for the time being, adding new amendments isn't really something we're doing as a country.


To be clear: I'm not requesting any new rights, merely the enforcement of existing legal principles that laws cannot be copyrighted by a private entity and that people have a fundamental right to freely read the laws that bind them.

Carl Malamud has been fighting this point worldwide with some success for decades. For example here's the state or Oregon agreeing: https://public.resource.org/oregon.gov/index.html




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