The state legislature no longer will charge thousands of dollars for copies of its annually updated database of the Colorado Revised Statutes and ancillary information such as source notes and editors’ notes, the Committee on Legal Services decided Friday.

The committee, which includes members of both the House and Senate, also voted to stop copyrighting the ancillary information. There is no copyright on the laws themselves.

Now, anyone who wants the giant database of state laws to create an online search engine or some other application can get it for free. The Office of Legislative Legal Services has been charging vendors $2,000 to $6,000 for the database, depending on the version. Continue...

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New Jersey's highest court is weighing whether police departments should be given broad discretion over which documents to release under the state's public records laws.

News organizations and civil liberties advocates say a decision in the case, which involves records from a police shooting requested by a media company, will have broad implications for transparency in New Jersey.

Law enforcement officials are keenly interested as well. They say they need to be able to withhold records from police investigations to keep from tainting potential witnesses and jurors. Continue...

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The Louisville Metro Government in Kentucky started its open data efforts in 2011 with a homegrown Web portal, and is now automating the publishing processes and using the data for performance improvement.

As it does so, Louisville is working with a handful of vendors specializing in open data catalog publishing. “We are at a crossroads,” said Jason Ballard, director of the Department of Information Technology.

The department has partnered with a company called NuCivic, which is developing an open source platform called DKAN, and is working with Socrata, the open data publishing vendor, on performance management. Continue...

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A bill that would exempt police departments at the University of Notre Dame and other private colleges from following the same crime reporting requirements as public colleges is headed to Gov. Mike Pence for his signature.

HB 1022, sponsored by state Rep. B. Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend, was approved 49-1 Tuesday by the Indiana Senate. It passed the House unanimously in January. Bauer this week filed a concurrence, which signals agreement with a Senate amendment.

The amendment states that a private university police officer will be granted the same protections and immunity for actions taken within the scope of their job as state police officers, and that private educational institutions and their governing bodies also would have the same statutory immunity granted to the state. Continue...

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In a unanimous vote, the Senate on Wednesday passed a compromise version of what started as the session’s most contentious bill involving public records exemptions.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Rene Garcia, R-Hialeah, would exempt agencies sued for public records violations from absorbing attorney fees if a judge determined a complainant was intentionally harassing or forcing a violation against that agency.

Current law requires judges to automatically award attorney fees against an agency that has broken Florida's open records laws, even in cases where agencies appear to have been bombarded with requests by groups seeking to pocket attorney fees. Continue...

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