Law.gov

Below is the text of Roberta Morris’ introduction for the Law.gov panel at Stanford Law School:

Welcome to Stanford Law School
and to the first workshop on
law.gov.  I’m Roberta Morris, a
lecturer at Stanford Law School,
with a long standing interest in the
rights of the public to the public
domain.  The purpose of the
law.gov initiative, and the series of
workshops across the country, is to
develop a report to give to
Congress to authorize public access
to what the public has bought and
paid for, and indeed, CREATED,
by being part of a democratic
society.  What that is is the law of
this country, federal state and
local.
We all learned at an early age
that ignorance of the law is no
excuse.  But that means that the
law should not be an instrument to
prevent our attempts to relieve our
ignorance.  Yet the law does just
that, with the 3 C’s:  copyright,
contracts and cash.  Try to find the
law and someone claims copyright,
someone demands you take a
license first, someone says you
have pay cash up front to open the
door to the library. As we
examined this morning, each is an
assertion of wrong, not of right.

This session of today‘s
workshop is entitled the Public
Presentation.  The speakers are
Carl Malamud, the initiator of
law.gov and he will explain what it
is and why he’s brought you here.
He’s not a lawyer, but an economist by training.  He is the
president and founder of
public.resource.org and recipient of
awards from, among others,
Harvard, the EFF and the First
Amendment Coalition.

Next will be Anurag Acharya.
He is a graduate of IIT of
Kharagpur and holds a Ph.D. from
Carnegie Mellon.  He was on the
computer science faculty at UCSB
after graduate school and then he
went to Google, first working on
web indexing and then inventing
Google Scholar and making it a
reality.

Last will be Jonathan Zittrain, a
graduate of Yale and Harvard Law
and a professor of law at Harvard
and co-director of the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society.
He has published widely both in
law reviews and not, and last year
he wrote a book called The Future
of the Internet and How to Stop It.
Ever since I first heard him give a
talk about 15 years ago about
using copyright notions to maintain
confidentiality of medical records –
I have thought he gives the best
law school talks.

Let’s welcome today‘s panelists.