Publish Georgia's State Laws, You'll Get Sued For Copyright and Lose (arstechnica.com)

Presto Vivace writes: If you want to read the official laws of the state of Georgia, it will cost you more than $1,000. Open-records activist Carl Malamud bought a hard copy, and it cost him $1,207.02 after shipping and taxes. A copy on CD was $1,259.41. The "good" news for Georgia residents is that they'll only have to pay $385.94 to buy a printed set from LexisNexis. Malamud thinks reading the law shouldn't cost anything. So a few years back, he scanned a copy of the state of Georgia's official laws, known as the Official Georgia Code Annotated, or OCGA. Malamud made USB drives with two copies on them, one scanned copy and another encoded in XML format. On May 30, 2013, Malamud sent the USB drives to the Georgia speaker of the House, David Ralson, and the state's legislative counsel, as well as other prominent Georgia lawyers and policymakers. Now, the case has concluded with U.S. District Judge Richard Story having published an opinion (PDF) that sides with the state of Georgia. The judge disagreed with Malamud's argument that the OCGA can't be copyrighted and also said Malamud's copying of the laws is not fair use. "The Copyright Act itself specifically lists 'annotations' in the works entitled to copyright protection," writes Story. "Defendant admits that annotations in an unofficial code would be copyrightable."

Slashdot reader Presto Vivace adds: "It could have been worse, at least he was not criminally charged liked Aaron Schwartz."

Comments

Re:Huh?

[LetterRip]

Aaron Schwartz is a sad case, but what does that have to do with copyrighting public law?

He was publishing public records of cases, which is a similar nonsensical offense to publishing the law.

Wait... bad summary?

[Mark19960]

Isn't the issue over the ANNOTATIONS and not the laws?
What am I missing?

Re:Wait... bad summary?

[AthanasiusKircher]

And the annotations (by law) do not carry the force of law (as that *would* make them uncopyrightable, as the linked decision points out). In short: the summary is not only clickbait, it's actually wrong. GA law is 100% completely free and available to all with no copyright restrictions.

In Georgia specifically, the situation is complicated and different from other states. (Even Wikipedia has a summary.)

Basically, in most states (and for federal law), the "annotations" are compiled references to relevant court cases, other laws, parts of the legislative record related to the law, etc. In almost all cases these are compiled by private businesses and copyrighted, sold to attorneys as a helpful tool. They have no official standing.

Georgia is different. The state of Georgia publishes an official set of annotations for its laws which apparently are maintained by the state (not a private business, as with most other annotated codes). Because of this official publication by the state government, Georgia case law frequently makes reference to the OFFICIAL annotations directly (since they are basically codified directly by the state), whereas in other states and for the federal government, you wouldn't reference the annotations directly (since they aren't official) -- you'd use the annotations to find references that you'd reference instead.

Georgia is a special case here, and it could legitimately be argued that keeping the official codified annotations private is basically keeping a STATE CODIFIED DOCUMENT from the public, which is obviously helpful for people who want to research the law, represent themselves in court, etc. In other states, the annotations are clearly owned by private businesses who compile them. In Georgia, they are an essential part of the official codified law as distributed directly from the state government.

So all those posts claiming this is "fake news" aren't quite right. It's true that you can get the text of Georgia statutes for free. But the state of Georgia here is also providing an official text that accompanies the code, but only for a fee. One could argue that, as an official state resource, it should be made accessible to the public too, like I always hear numerous Slashdot commenters bitching endlessly about how any scientific research with even a tiny percentage of government funding should have its results published freely and accessible for free.

Where are all those Slashdot commenters here yelling about access to government-sponsored documents here?? Instead, we just seem to have a number of modded up comments claiming TFA is "fake news." Sure, there's an argument that the state should be able to copyright its publications, so it's not clear that they should necessarily make it available for free. But the situation in Georgia with the state law is different from most states, making TFA's description *not* a clear-cut case (for or against).

Once again I'd like to remind America

[rsilvergun]

you have a ruling class, you just don't like to acknowledge them. You'll never get rid of them ( wealth and privilege gains you entry and you're not getting rid of that any time soon) but there's a lot more you could do to reign them in if you'd stop pretending they don't exist.

Re:Once again I'd like to remind America

[Anonymous Coward]

I once again submit my petition for a +1 Depressing mod.

Stop spreading BS.

[thesupraman]

Great, care to point out where those laws are available freely WITHOUT those annotations?

They are simply being used as a vector to allow copyright to be exercised on public information.
Its exactly like adding a copyright page to the front of a public document, and claiming that page is copyright, therefore the whole document is.

The fact is that a public of 'public servants' dont want the general public to have free access to the laws that govern them, and are willling to
spend the publics money to protect the public from knowing their own laws.

Nice, isnt it.

Re:Stop spreading BS.

[Baloroth]

Great, care to point out where those laws are available freely WITHOUT those annotations?

Yes, on the public website of the company that published the annotated texts. Here, to be incredibly specific.