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 We testified, as did some Oregon citizens. The lawyer for the legislature gave his testimony, and I was impressed by how well informed and willing to look at the issues everybody was.

After a lot of questions, the Legislative Counsel Committee, which was chaired by the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House, voted unanimously to waive any assertions of copyright. It was democracy in action, and way quicker than a law suit.

To prove the point about why this was so important to do, a few months later, a second-year law student at Lewis & Clark took the statutes and created OregonLaws.Org, a dramatically better version of the Oregon statutes featuring a great UI, valid HTML, permaURLs, an iPhone app, tag clouds, a twitter feed, and loads of other bells and whistles.

When a state asserts copyright over legal materials, it is important to remember that while this is partly about democracy and justice, it is also about innovation. By requiring a license as a precondition to access primary legal materials, we create a barrier to innovation.

I'd like to end this tale with a bureaucracy that is a bit amorphous, a little hard to visualize and thus an exceedingly difficult target and that bureaucracy is all the lawyers in the United States of America. When it comes to bureaucracies, the bar truly is the borg.

The principle that access to the law must be unfettered is a basic foundation of our system of justice. The U.S.