Page:Code Swaraj - Carl Malamud - Sam Pitroda.djvu/137

Note on Code Swaraj year. Other examples were military officers getting an advanced degree in procurement law as part of their official duties and writing a journal article to obtain their degree. In none of these cases were articles identified as works of government.

In addition to searching the general purpose scholarly literature and the legal literature and amassing a large body of evidence, I was digging deep into the legal literature to understand the genesis of the works of government clause and how it had been interpreted by the courts. I was able to trace the genesis of this clause to the Printing Act of 1895 and the controversy raised when a Senator attempted to assert copyright over a compilation of papers from the Presidents. I then showed the subsequent legislative and judicial history of the clause as it was made part of the Copyright Act of 1909 and then interpreted by the courts and in subsequent laws.

I Go To The Bar And Am Asked To Leave

I had come up with a strategy to walk this issue out the door. That strategy consisted of bringing a resolution before the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates. To do this, one normally must be a lawyer, but two of my board members are members of the ABA, and my thought was that I would write a paper with them as co-authors presenting the issues, and we would present a resolution before the House of Delegates, asking the ABA to endorse the idea that we should all follow the provisions of copyright law. It seemed like a sensible proposition.

As a non-lawyer, I had been able in 2016 to address the House of Delegates by obtaining what are known as “special privileges of the floor.” The topic that year was a resolution about access to standards incorporated by reference into federal law and the ABA had proposed a solution that would have made these technical laws available, but only as so-called “read-only access,” which meant no one could actually access the law in a useful format without paying money. Under this system, one still could not speak the law without permission from a private party. I opposed the resolution, as did the standards bodies who were against any free access at all. Because we both opposed the resolution, the sections sponsoring the resolution felt they had done a Solomonic feat of splitting the baby in half. They passed their resolution over my strident objections, but at least they gave me a voice.