Up until tonight, I had read in my life only two articles on Liberia that involved serious investigative reporting. The first was a piece in the Wall Street Journal a few years back about the US Embassy refusing to tell the Department of Defense how much money they were spending to train the Liberian army. The second I’m not going to mention, but it appeared in a Liberian paper.
So tonight’s article marks the third. (Hat tip to Brad.) Jina Moore and Glenna Gordon have a piece in Foreign Policy that documents why courts, lawyers, and the parliament do not have physical copies of the country’s complete legal code: Philip Banks, a former Minister of Justice under Sirleaf, has copyrighted many of the volumes of legal code!
…Banks led a team of lawyers… to codify the country’s newest laws. The project…won just over $400,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice…
Defending himself in an interview with FP on Oct.27, Banks says he numbered, bound, and indexed the newer laws — intellectual work that he claims as his original property. Banks says the DoJ funding wasn’t enough to cover his costs. So when DoJ declined to give him more, he asserted a claim of copyright on the work, according to an explanation of the issue he sent by e-mail to a justice sector consultant in 2006. It’s a claim he has appeared willing to relinquish several times for sums between $150,000 and $360,000, according to the e-mail exchanges, which were obtained by FP.
Banks and the group he worked with are trying to sell the copyright to the Liberian government for a few hundred thousand dollars.
Read the whole article here.
The 2007 UN Panel Report raised this issue (S/2007/340) too.
They said:
180. The issue of the copyright status of the Liberian Law Codes and Records has
been impeding the reproduction and dissemination of those materials. Liberian Law
Reports Inc., a company headed by Councillor Philip Banks, is claiming copyright
over work that it carried out on the Liberian Law Reports Supreme Court Opinions,
volumes 28 to 39, even though it did so under a paid contract with the United States
Government. Having corresponded with the United States Department of Justice,
which oversaw the work, the Panel believes that the company’s grounds for
claiming copyright are questionable and ethically dubious.
181. The Panel recommends that an electronic version of the work carried out by
Liberian Law Reports Inc., under contract with the United States Government be
supplied to the Government of Liberia for the benefit of the nation, in keeping with
policy of the United States Agency for International Development on copyright
authorization.
The Government of Liberia should reprint the law (removing whatever intellectual property is Mr Banks’ own [i.e., notations, etc]) as well as publishing the laws electronically. They could publish a lot of copies for $100,000.
But the US Government should also clarify what exactly the contract was the Mr Banks was awarded. Generally when work is done under contract, the contractor holds any copyright, not the contractee…