Why there isn&#39;t any law resulting from the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2019? It was stated that no later than 2 years, law must be created according to this bill. I can't find the law anywhere. Talking about this bill: H.R.2231 - Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2019
The bill was never passed. According to the list of all actions on Congress.gov, the bill was referred to the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce in April 2019. Evidently, that subcommittee never did anything further with it. The bill was never voted on by either the House or the Senate.
Algorithms are not subject to copyright. A particular implementation can be copyrighted, but an algorithm itself can't be copyrighted. Someone re-implementing the algorithm with their own code has done nothing to give you copyright claims against their work, and is not bound by any software license you use. That's what patents are for.
By default a new US Federal law is effective as soon as it is enacted. That is, when the President signs it, when the 10 days for approval expire without the President vetoing it, or on the date when the second of the houses of Congress votes to override a veto. However, in modern usage, many, perhaps most, statutes specify as pone of their provisions an effective date some time after the date of enactment, in some cases several years later. If such a date is specified, that is the legal date. All bills and the actions enacting them are recorded in the Congressional Record, which is a public document, published on a regular basis. They are generally included in the next revision of the USC (united States Code) and the USCA (United States Code, Annotated). But these publications are generally well after the date of enactment. The Thomson Reuters Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing (winter 2000) “HOW Can I Tell the Effective Date of a Federal Statute?” by Barbara Bintliff says: The generally applicable rule is easy to state: a federal statute usually takes effect on the date of its enactment,3 which is itself determined by when the last step necessary for the statute’s enactment occurred. Most of the time the last step in the enactment process is the president’s signature, and this date, therefore, becomes the date of effectiveness for most federal statutes. However, there are exceptions to the general rule. For instance, sometimes the last step occurs when Congress overrides the president’s veto, or when the bill is allowed to become law without a presidential signature. And sometimes a later date is specified by the terms of the statute itself. The article geos on to say: The date of enactment is most easily located by consulting the parenthetical information provided after every statutory section included in the print and online versions of the United States Code (USC), the United States Code Annotated® (USCA®), and the United States Code Service (USCS).5 The parenthetical is variously called a “source note,” “statutory authority,” “statutory history,” “history,” “source credit,” or “credit.” In the print versions, the parenthetical follows the statutory section with nothing in between the statutory text and the source note. In the primary online versions, it is labeled “credit” (in USCA on Westlaw) or “history” (in USCS on LEXIS-NEXIS). The credit has been included with federal statutes since they were first codified in the Revised Statutes of 1874 and is an official part of the statute. "Enactment of a Law - Learn About the Legislative Process" from Congress.gov describes the procsss also, saying: If the president does approve it, he signs the bill, giving the date, and transmits this information by messenger to the Senate or the House, as the case might be. In the case of revenue and tariff bills, the hour of approval is usually indicated. The enrolled bill is delivered to the archivist of the U.S., who designates it as a public or private law, depending upon its purpose, and gives it a number. Public and private laws are numbered separately and serially. An official copy is sent to Government Printing Office to be used in making the so-called slip law print. ... If a bill which has been vetoed is passed upon reconsideration by the first House by the required two-thirds vote, an endorsement to this effect is made on the back of the bill, and it is then transmitted, together with the accompanying message, to the second House for its action thereon. If likewise reconsidered and passed by that body, a similar endorsement is made thereon. The bill, which has thereby been enacted into law, is not again presented to the president, but is delivered to the Administrator of the General Services Administration for deposit in the Archives, and is printed, together with the attestations of the secretary of the Senate and the clerk of the House of its passage over the president's veto.
What you're talking about is called black-box reverse engineering. It can be done, and as long as you are meticulous in your record keeping the fact that it has been done should be an appropriate defence against copyright infringement. But that doesn't help against patent claims - while in copyright cases the fact that code has or has not been directly copied is critical, in patent cases it its irrelevant: if you use a patented method, it's a violation. You therefore will need to be careful about any patents that may have been issued to the original author, as well as avoiding copying.
The lack of a copyright notice is irrelevant, what matters is whether permission is granted. The material cannot be copied, except if the copyright holder grants you permission to copy. However, you might be able to create something legal and satisfactory on your own, because the underlying ideas are not protected. By way of analogy, you cannot copy the Turbo Pascal Numeric Methods library without permission, but you can study the logic of a module and write your own FFT routine. The status of something as &quot;declaring code&quot; is entirely irrelevant to the court's decision in Google v. Oracle. What is relevant to the court's finding of fair use is that the content constituted 0.4 percent of the entire API, and the fact that the copied lines of code are inextricably bound to other lines of code that are accessed by programmers, allowing programmers to bring their skills to a new environment. The court found that he amount of copying was tethered to a valid, and transformative, purpose.
The liability shield is the big one, and it can't be achieved with a contract. Just because the contract says you're not liable, that doesn't make it true. If I sign a contract with my friend that says "Nate Eldredge is hereby the King of France", that won't make me the king, nor will it force anyone except maybe my friend to acknowledge me as the king. By its nature, a contract can only bind the parties to the contract, and has no effect on the rights of anyone else. Suppose, then, that Alice and Bob agree to start a pizza delivery business, using a contract like you suggest. Their delivery car crashes, injuring Carol, a bystander, who incurs medical bills that exceed the assets of the business. Carol decides to sue Alice and Bob personally. Sure, Alice and Bob have a contract, and maybe it prevents them from suing each other, but it certainly doesn't prevent Carol from suing them; Carol never signed it. So Carol can still go after Alice and Bob's personal assets. Thus contract law cannot give them a liability shield. However, the government can, since it makes the laws about who can sue whom under what circumstances. And it has made laws saying that Alice and Bob can be protected from such suits, but only if they form a company according to the process that the law sets forth. So that's what they have to do.
The law works in the opposite direction of what you seem to be imagining. State courts generally have jurisdiction to hear lawsuits based on federal law, even without &quot;authorization&quot; from Congress. It is therefore perfectly normal to see lawsuits under Section 1983 , the Privacy Protection Act, or the Magnuson-Moss Consumer Protection Act being litigated in state court. Instead, when Congress authorizes a private right of action, it includes explicit language when it does not want cases heard in state court. This is the case with copyright, patent, and bankruptcy litigation, for example.
The Copyright Office has determined, in chapter 300 of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, on page 36, that the copyright bar extends to works created by the President; Congress; the federal judiciary; federal departments, agencies, boards, bureaus, or commissions; or any other officer or employee of the U.S. federal government while acting within the course of his or her official duties. So the Senator is a US employee for copyright purposes, at least according to the US Copyright Office. Technically, this is interpretation rather than law, and in theory a court might disagree, but if anyone is qualified to speak on this issue, it's the Copyright Office. In my opinion, it is most reasonable to assume that the Copyright Office is correct in their interpretation unless there is case law directly contradicting them. The only question is whether the letter was created by the Senator &quot;while acting within the course of his or her official duties.&quot; I'm not aware of any case law suggesting that constituent building is or is not an &quot;official duty&quot; of a US Senator, and there are reasonable arguments to be made in both directions. On the one hand, the letter is clearly beyond the scope of Congress's lawmaking and oversight Constitutional functions. On the other, the office of Senator is an inherently political office, and a case can be made that campaigning for reelection is part of the job. Perhaps surprisingly, that question was extensively litigated during E. Jean Carroll's first defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump, because Trump argued that his statements about Carroll were within the scope of his employment (and so a defamation claim would be effectively barred under the Westfall Act). To my understanding, the current disposition of that lawsuit is that this is considered a question of fact for a jury to decide (at least according to the Second Circuit). What can be said is who does not hold copyright: The US Senate and/or the US government as a whole. The only way the Senate could acquire copyright in this letter (short of the Senator directly granting it to them) would be as a work made for hire, but the work-for-hire doctrine requires that the work be prepared by an employee as part of their official duties, just like the federal copyright bar. So the Senate cannot acquire copyright in this manner. If anyone owns the copyright, it is most likely the Senator.