Supreme Court Says State Laws Aren’t Copyrightable

guest · Apr 29, 2020

Supreme Court Says State Laws Aren’t Copyrightable
April 29, 2020
https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/georgia-state-law-copyright-lexis-nexis-supreme-court.html

When Harvard decided to digitize its entire collection of U.S. case law in 2013, it couldn’t just scan the 40 million pages it had amassed in its Law School library and put them up online—it had to undertake an expensive and time-consuming process of redacting notes, annotations, and anything else surrounding the actual caselaw that might not be in the public domain and could therefore trigger a copyright lawsuit.

That same year, Carl Malamud, the founder of nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org, decided to do something similar with the Georgia state laws. However, he took a different route.
He purchased a hard copy of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated for more than $1,200 from LexisNexis, scanned it, and sent USB drives with two copies of the entire state code to several Georgia legislators.

He also posted it online, prompting the state of Georgia to sue him for copyright infringement in a lawsuit that memorably accused Malamud of “terrorism,” stating,

“Consistent with its strategy of terrorism, Defendant freely admits to the copying and distribution of massive numbers of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Annotations on at least its https://yeswescan.org website.”
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On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Malamud, saying that Georgia state laws and their official annotations, like all other works authored by judges or legislators, are not copyrightable.

It may be a little surprising that in 2020, state laws were not already clearly in the public domain, especially because U.S. copyright law explicitly designates work and statutes produced by the federal government as not being protected by copyright. That exemption doesn’t apply to state governments, though.
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Ars Technica: If you publish Georgia’s state laws, you’ll get sued for copyright and lose (March 30, 2017)

If you want to read the official laws of the state of Georgia, it will cost you more than $1,000.
"Access to the law is a fundamental aspect of our system of democracy, an essential element of due process, equal protection, and access to justice," [...]

For now, the Georgia laws have been removed from Public.Resource.Org, and replaced with a notification that "your access to this document, which is a law of the United States of America, has been temporarily disabled while we fight for your right to read and speak the laws by which we choose to govern ourselves as a democratic society.
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guest · Apr 29, 2020

Supreme Court Affirms That No One Owns the Law
April 27, 2020
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/supreme-court-affirms-no-one-owns-law

In a major victory for open government and fundamental due process, the Supreme Court ruled today that the annotations in a state’s official legal code—summaries of court decisions and other sources that explain the state’s laws—cannot be copyrighted. That is, that there cannot be a better-explained version of the law available only to those who can afford to pay for it. The law, in any form, must be accessible to all.

“Officials empowered to speak with the force of law,” wrote the Court [pdf], “cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties.” This decision means the state of Georgia will not be able to stop the open government nonprofit Public.Resource.Org, or any other member of the public, from copying, sharing, speaking, or quoting the state’s official code.
Writing for a five-justice majority, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that materials made by government officials who are “vested with the authority to make and interpret the law,” and acting within their official duties, are not “works of authorship” under the Copyright Act. “The animating principle behind this rule,” wrote the chief justice, “is that no one can own the law.”
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Today’s decision sends a strong and welcome signal that copyright should not thwart the essential public interest in accessing and sharing the law. We hope lower courts obey that admonition, so we can free all of the law, once and for all.
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