The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that copyright protection does not apply to annotations in state’s annotated legal code. The ruling in Georgia v. Public Resource.Org affects 23 states, two territories and Washington, D.C.

PIJIP Professor Peter Jaszi commented that “this is the beginning of the end of a long journey toward opening all judicial and legislative materials to the public – the modern stage of which began more than thirty-five years ago in the West Publishing cases. The struggle to open governmental information at every level of the administrative state continues.”

The state of Georgia had copyrighted the annotated version of its law, which is LexisNexis makes available for a fee. According to Tim Lee at Ars Technica “You can get an unofficial version of state law for free from LexisNexis’ website, but LexisNexis’ terms of service explicitly warned users that it might be inaccurate. The company also prohibits users from scraping the site’s content or using it commercially. If you need the official, up-to-date version of Georgia state law, you have to pay LexisNexis hundreds of dollars for a copy of the official version—which includes annotations.”

The nonprofit Public.Resource.Org placed the annotated version of the law online for free. It argued that the annotated law was an official document of the state legislature.

In his ruling, Chief Judge Roberts stated that “Officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties.”

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