My thought was that if there were a robust discussion of the issues within the framework of legal publishing being also presented, but with the broader implications of all scholarly knowledge and education, perhaps the ABA would look at this as an opportunity to take a stand in favor of obeying the legal requirements of the U.S. Copyright Act.
I spent the spring working on that scholarly paper on works of the U.S. government, and ended up with 15 pages (the maximum allowed) with 69 footnotes that presented the results of our audit and traced the genesis and application of the law. The resolution was quite simple, saying that if an employee wrote a piece in the course of their official duties, a copy of that article should be deposited with the Government Publishing Office. This was already a requirement for government-printed publications, and we would have simply extended that existing mechanism to cover these journal articles.
The second recommendation of the resolution was that publishers (including the ABA) should properly label any works of government upon publication, indicating which portions were not subject to copyright as required by law. Again, this was an existing requirement, not some novel or radical change. The resolution was prospective: it applied to articles published in the future and did not address the extensive backfile that had been mislabeled.
My resolution was submitted to the Committee on Rules and Calendar, and I went through an extensive process of revision to meet their very precise rules. For example, though I was an associate member of the American Bar Association, only full members had the right to submit a resolution for consideration on the floor. Not being a lawyer admitted to practice, I did not qualify. I began by putting myself down as the sole author of the paper (which I indeed was), and when that was rejected, put my board members and myself as the authors, but that was also rejected. Only when I removed my name altogether was that considered acceptable. At the end of the day, my resolution was accepted for consideration, and was scheduled for floor debate at the mid-August annual meeting in New York.
The way the ABA works is there are a number of sections, each with a layer of delegates, officers, committees, and rules. The depth of the various bureaucracies and rule books is really quite impressive. Typically, a resolution is submitted by one of the sections. Though individual members are allowed to do so, it is somewhat rare. When one section submits a resolution, it is forwarded to all other sections for possible co-sponsorship. In the ABA culture, many resolutions are co-sponsored by many sections and most have no opposition.
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