Open Source Law

Russ Nelson writes "The U.S. Supreme Court just announced its refusal to review the 5th Circuit's en banc decision that there can be no copyright of privately authored laws offered to U.S. governmental bodies for adoption. The model law itself may be copyrighted, but once it's adopted, the law must be open source. The entire case is laid out on Peter Veeck's page." Slashdot touched on this before, but never really covered this dispute in depth. Here's a nice legal summary of the case.