The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision this week that expanded public access to annotated state codes, while ruling that the official work of legislators cannot be copyrighted. The decision resulted from a case filed by the State of Georgia that claimed copyright protections for annotated versions of the state code, which had been produced by the legal publisher LexisNexis under an agreement with the state. When Public.Resource.org – a group dedicated to making government materials more accessible – put the annotated codes online, the state sued them for copyright infringement.
The State of Georgia argued that the annotations were copyrightable under several different grounds, including because they were “non-binding and non-authoritative,” and as such were subject to copyright. The federal appeals court ruled against the state, noting that while the annotations were not explicitly laws, they were “sufficiently lawlike,” and “clearly have authoritative weight in explicating and establishing the meaning and effect of Georgia’s laws.”
The Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision to uphold the appellate court ruling against the state, however the majority decision focused on a different aspect of the annotations in reaching their decision. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that courts should not “examin[e] whether given material carries ‘the force of law,’” but instead should “ask only whether the author of the work is a judge or legislator,” because “whatever work that judge or legislator produces in the course of his judicial or legislative duties is not copyrightable.”
The ruling establishes a clear precedent for public access to the work of our elected legislators, which is a win for public records researchers.