The US Supreme Court has quite
recently ruled that Georgia, a state located in the southeastern region of the
US, can’t claim the Copyright over
its annotated code.
The ruling held by the Supreme
Court is a victory for Carl Malamud, who is an American author, technologist,
and open government activist. In 2013, he had posted Georgia’s annotated code
online. For more than a decade now, Malamud and his corporation,
Public.Resource.Org (publishes and shares the public domain material in the US
and all across the globe), have been working efficiently to liberate the state
laws and regulatory codes digitally.
State governments and related
authorities quite often claim that they must copyright the works and creations
to recoup the expenses involved in the research and print of voluminous
editions. Georgia has a contract with LexisNexis (a corporation specializing in
providing business research, legal research, and risk management services) to
govern the research work and distribution of the annotated codes. LexisNexis,
in turn, gets the exclusive rights corresponding to publishing the codes, while
the state gets a cut of any sales made. The non-annotated codes are available
at no cost; however, the hardcover annotated set costs $412. The copyright
clash stemmed from Georgia’s lawsuit against Public Resource when the non-profit
corporation tried to publish the code on its own.
Malamud and other transparency
groups say that law can never be copyrighted. They believe that under the
“Government edicts doctrine,” the same holds for legislative statutes, judicial
opinions, and any other writing corresponding to the force of law. They always
say that as per the public policy, people must be able to inspect all the laws
that are bound by, and no one can ever claim the ownership or authorship of
such laws. To be specific, what they mean to say is that the laws belong to the
people.
After Public Resource posted
Georgia’s annotated code online for free, the state sued Malamud and his
corporation in 2015 in federal court. In 2017, a US District Court judge
rendered a decision in favor of Georgia by stating that the annotations only
had pieces of commentary and didn’t focus on the force of law. However, after
some time, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the
district court’s ruling, which led to a showdown at the US Supreme Court.
In the US Supreme Court’s majority
decision, Chief Justice John Roberts stated that the officials empowered to
speak with the force of law can never claim authorship of the works, which they
create in due course of their official duties. He further said that even if the
annotated codes were non-binding, they were still very much created in the
official capacity by the legislative branch, which doesn’t enable the same to
seek Copyright
Protection.
In a recent statement delivered,
Malamud mentioned that he and his corporation are happy with the US Supreme
Court’s decision and are now looking forward to making the Official Code of
Georgia readily accessible and usable for the citizens. ✅ For view source: https://www.trademarkmaldives.com/blog/the-us-supreme-court-holds-that-georgia-cant-claim-copyright-over-its-annotated-code/
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