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The State of Georgia in the US is suing the owner of the Public.Resource.org website for publishing the State of Georgia's own laws online.
According to the lawsuit [PDF] filed this week, Carl Malamud has "engaged in an 18 year long crusade to control the accessibility of U.S. government documents by becoming the United States’ Public Printer."
Although an alternative reading could be that he was simply publishing public laws on the internet.
At the center of the issue is not Georgia's basic legal code – that is made readily available online and off – but the annotated version of it. That annotated version is frequently used by the courts to make decisions of law, and as such Malamud decided it should also be made easily accessible online.
Georgia says that information is copyrighted, however, and it wants him to stop publishing it. Currently you can access the information through legal publisher Lexis Nexis, either by paying $378 for a printed copy or by going through an unusual series of online steps from Georgia's General Assembly website through to Lexis Nexis' relevant webpages (going direct to the relevant Lexis Nexis webpages will give you a blank page).
[...] However, the State of Georgia filing points to a little more animus than concerns over scanned documents. In particular it uses a quote of Malamud's from an article in 2009 in which he talked about committing "standards terrorism" to actually accuse Malamud of committing a form of terrorism. "Consistent with its strategy of terrorism, Defendant freely admits to the copying and distribution of massive numbers of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Annotations," reads the lawsuit in part.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Monday July 27 2015, @04:15PM
We can have an argument on whether there should be copyright at all, or how long it should last, but the annotations are copyrightable even if the source material is not. http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#103 [copyright.gov]
The issue here is with the annotations, not the edicts of government. The specific statutes are freely available as well as the court opinions interpreting those statutes (these are the edicts in the public domain). Statutory annotations are summaries of important cases which interpret the statutes -- in an annotated version of the code, you look up the statute and below the text, there will be short summaries of cases dealing with that law.
Westlaw and Lexis/Nexis make their living in part by publishing annotations. The stock material they use is public domain, but their analysis is a derived creative product that is greater than the sum of the public domain components because it makes legal research easier by providing a convenient starting point.
(Score: 5, Informative) by physicsmajor on Monday July 27 2015, @05:45PM
The annotations ceased being copyright eligible when the State called them Official. This is very clear in both case law and the official policy I quoted.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:35AM
Well that adds a wrinkle. I agree that if the summaries were commissioned by the state, then they should be in the public domain because the public paid for them.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 27 2015, @09:57PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:34AM
The summaries are written by lawyers in the employ of Westlaw/Lexis. There are two levels of creativity involved, 1) deciding that a case applies to a particular law (this can be very easy to very hard depending on the case) and 2) condensing a 10-30 page decision into a two or three sentence summary. The cases are in the public domain, the summaries not, at least in most circumstances.