Re: [d@DCC] Are there "diff"s available for amendments?

From: Andy Kaplan-Myrth <techlaw _-at-_ uottawa.ca>
To: "General Copyright Discussions \(questions, organizing, etc\)" <discuss (at) list.digital-copyright.ca>
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:38:34 -0500
References: <6defe8840801241105p6a895fffs1cf18b493d1d8bd6@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

Denver Gingerich wrote:
> I was reading through Bill C-60 recently and found it very annoying to
> have to look at the Copyright Act to provide context when I saw
> phrases like "Paragraph 2.4(1)(a) of the Act is replaced by the
> following:".

Yes, it's annoying, but that's how Bills work. And they often make 
changes to more than one piece of legislation, so a single page showing 
one Act may not be the best way to show the changes once the Bill is passed.

> While it is probably necessary to have this kind of
> description for amendments, I find it much easier to read these sorts
> of changes in a format like MediaWiki's difference viewer [1].

What a great idea. I'd suggest it should be different from your usual 
wiki where the focus is on the page and you go look at the history to 
see the differences. This would be more of a legislation bug tracker.

It would have a database of current legislation. The main page would be 
a list of Bills (past and present), so you could pick different Bills 
and see how the affected laws would change if those Bills were 
"committed", so to speak.

And as Bills were passed, you could just commit the changes in the Bills 
on the site to keep the legislation database up to date so over time it 
would come to show both the history of past changes as well.

I'm not aware of anything like this. Could a wiki or bug tracker be 
adapted to do this?

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
Andy Kaplan-Myrth, M.A., LL.B.
Manager, Law & Technology, University of Ottawa

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Faculty of Law : Faculté de droit
University of Ottawa : Université d'Ottawa
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Canada

t. 613/562-5800 x3206
f. 613/562-5124
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