I’ll admit that the Medium Legal team’s post AB 2880?—?Kill (this) Bill had me at hello:
Fellow Californians, please join us in opposing AB 2880, which would allow and encourage California to extend copyright protection to works made by the state government. We think it’s a bad idea that would wind up limiting Californians’ ability to post and read government information on platforms like Medium.
That sure does sound like a bad idea, and hey, I’m a Californian now too. But when I try to read the actual bill I find it hard to relate its text to Medium Legal’s interpretations, or to some others:
- Copyright California: How a new bill could curtail access to public information (Sunlight Foundation)
- California’s Legislature Wants to Copyright All Government Works (EFF)
- Bill Analysis (leginfo.legislature.ca) (4 docs, individual links not available)
- Assembly Third Reading (an annotatable copy of one of those 4 docs)
I doubt I’m alone in struggling to connect these interpretations to their evolving source text. Medium Legal says, for example:
AB 2880 requires the state’s Department of General Services to track the copyright status of works created by the state government’s 228,000 employees, and requires every state agency to include intellectual property clauses in every single one of their contracts unless they ask the Department in advance for permission not to do so.
What’s the basis for this interpretation? How do Medium Legal think the text of the bill itself supports it? I find four mentions of the Department of General Services in the bill: (1), (2), (3), (4). To which of these do Medium Legal refer? Do they also rely on the Assembly Third Reading? How? I wish Medium Legal had, while preparing their post, annotated those sources.
The Assembly Third Reading, meanwhile, concludes:
Summary of the bill: In summary, this bill does all of the following:
1) clarifies existing law that state agencies may own, license, and register intellectual property to the extent not inconsistent with the rights of the public to obtain, inspect, copy, publish and otherwise communicate under the California Public Records Act, the California Constitution as provided, and under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution;2) ……7) …Analysis Prepared by: Eric Dang / JUD. / (NNN) NNN-NNNN
The same questions apply. How does Eric Dang think the source text supports his interpretation? How do his seven points connect to the bill under analysis? Again, an annotation layer would help us anchor the analysis to its sources.
Medium Legal and Eric Dang used digital tools to make notes supporting their essays. Such notes are, by default, not hyperinked to specific source passages and not available to us as interpretive lenses. Modern web annotation flips that default. Documents remain canonical; notes anchor precisely to words and sentences; the annotation layer is a shareable overlay. There’s no copying, so no basis for the chilling effect that critics of AB 2880 foresee. While the bill might limit Californians’ ability to post and read government information on platforms like Medium, it won’t matter one way or the other to Californians who do such things on platforms like Hypothesis.
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