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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

The EFF has blogged about an appeals court decision which tellst the state of Georgia that State laws can’t be copyrighted [eff.org]. The problem arose from many state codes simply pointing to proprietary specifications. While this can have the benefit of standardizing codes across states, the downside is that it was locking the laws behind paywalls.

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit handed down a powerful opinion [uscourts.gov] [PDF] that struck down the state of Georgia’s attempt to use copyright to suppress publication of its own laws. The ruling, which gives Georgians the right to read and publish the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, or OCGA, may also improve public access to legislative documents in other states. It’s just in time for this year’s Open Access Week [openaccessweek.org], a time to celebrate the social benefits that we all reap when information is readily accessible.

The case originated when Georgia’s Code Revision Commission threatened, and ultimately sued, open records activist Carl Malamud and his organization Public.Resource.Org [resource.org] (PRO). In an effort to make Georgia’s official laws easily accessible, Malamud had bought a hard copy of the OCGA [arstechnica.com], paying more than $1,200 for it. (The 11^th Circuit opinion reports that a copy currently costs $404, although it isn’t clear if that price applies to non-residents.) Malamud then scanned the books, and sent each Georgia legislator a USB stick with two full copies—one of the scanned OCGA, and another encoded in XML format.

The court decision is a major step forward in the larger fight to free law from copyright. It is important to bring up the fact that copyright, as written into the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8), is meant to spur the production of new works, not to stifle it nor to create profit motives around the work of public employees.

Original Submission