I do not understand this story. How can law be "under copyright"?
The defendant was told he could publish the actual law, and his own analysis. However it gets really murky when “Georgia’s courts have cited to the annotations as authoritative sources on statutory meaning and legislative intent.”
I can see the argument against this being freely publishable. If I wrote a textbook which explains some badly written and archaic laws really well, and lawyers and judges started to look to it as the de facto law, should that void my copyright? On the other hand, the public should have free access to the interpretation of the law as enforced.
This sentiment discounts whole segments of the population with mobility or visual impairments, for starters. Why shouldn't courts become more open over time to scrutiny, taking advantage of technical advances to increase transparency and by proxy faith in the institution of the courts?
Given copyright only exists under the law, in the rare case that this happens, a sensible fudge would be to make a compulsary purchase of the copyright for the assessed market value, so it can become public domain. Much in the same way as you would do for any other property when you need to build municipal infrastructure through it. The law is essentially municipal infrastructure anywazy, so it isn't that much of a legal stretch.
Side-note: I don't really care that my above post has been downvoted, but it seems pretty counter-productive to the HN cultural goal of intellectual discourse for people to downvote input from actual practitioners in the field just because they don't like the answer.
I would expect any reasonable government to do one of:
- Write their own, non-copyrighted version of the law in question.
- Pay you decent amout of money and become copyright owner prior to including your textbook in the official law code.
I think that's the primary difference between civil and common law: in civil law legal system you cannot have "de facto laws" - either something is codified in form of (non-copyrtightable) parlimentary bill or executive order, or is not a law at all.
This isn't effectively true in practise. While there is no foundation of stare decisis in Civil law, there is the commonly recognised concept of jurisprudence constante (stable law). That is: judges will often look to precedent in making decisions, but are not bound by it. A pattern of past decisions will often be highly persuasive because there is interest in not interpreting the law arbitrarily, and courts tend not to want to make a decision they expect will be overturned on appeal.
Are private companies actually writing annotations that affect judges decisions? That sounds like they are effectively writing the law.
Or, if they're just compiling judges' writings, how do they have copyright on those?
That isn't unprecedented. When Congress passes a law, the executive branch has wide discretion on how to interpret the law into executive action.
So its the interpretation that is used. Then shouldn't the interpretation be open to public? What kind of justice system is this?
The kind where a federal court tells the State of Georgia to do exactly that.
The lower court ruled that the annotations were public domain, and the Supreme Court will (hopefully) concur. The state (of Georgia) has a ... requirement(?) to defend (and enforce) the statutes (and contracts) as passed by its legislator. If the state (of Georgia) didn't enforce its own laws, now, that would be a lawless, chaotic state; they'd also not be able to engage in contracts with companies (too much risk). Instead, this thing is going through the well-understood & time-worn constitutional process, as intended: the state (of Georgia) did a thing; a citizen did a thing; they sue each other; and, now, the Supreme Court will decide: is the citizen in the right or is the state (of Georgia) in the right.
The best that money can buy.
I think it is time for people to stop having faith in the legal system. It is dangerous waters to tread, but our current system is filled with abuses that are only allowed to continue because people maintain faith.
What you do is you pack your laws into something else for example a new fancy construct you have just build. Let's call that new construct "bubbles". So your law is now inside your bubbles and you put copyright on you bubbles... Until the SCOTUS says "NO!" again.
It's 3y/o playing government for their business friends.
For example, the law might say that it's illegal to operate a pressure vessel unless in satisfies all the requirements of ASME Section VIII Division 1 or 2. As you might guess, the ASME boiler and pressure vessel code is a copyrighted work owned by the ASME.
The law says: pressure vessels must be pretty sturdy even when really hot.
A standard comes along and proclaims to abide by said law, while fleshing out the details of how sturdy and how hot. Lawyers and judges then make reference to it as what the law always meant, and effectively give it legal force.
Sometimes it's a bit less direct. They law might require a vessel operator to have insurance and the insurance company will demand that the vessel conform to some private code.
There isn't always a "correct" in any way you can prove. Often you just have norms.
If someone heats the vessel up to an arbitrary temperature X, and it explodes, yet the standard which everyone except you followed said it must withstand arbitrary temperature Y, then the court may be inclined to ignore your arguments that temperature X was good enough.
Rather than being something you can derive from nature, laws and standards often contain arbitrary values which take into account margins for human error or other "reasonable" measures.
In this way, norms gain legal power.
So although using 'terrorism' is clearly ridiculous, the rest of it is not so clear cut.
Also note that the laws with the annotations are available in public libraries. So freemium.
This is a separate from the (also unbelievable, to me) issue that a paid private corporation writes these annotations that are then referenced with the force of law by the courts.
I don't understand why they need a relationship.
Good annotations are incredibly valuable. When I was in law school, both West and Lexis were publishing annotated versions of both federal law and the law of every state, entirely on their own. Pretty much every lawyer bought the relevant West and/or Lexis products for their practice areas, and pretty much every law library bought more complete sets of these products.
Has something changed making it so the publishers need financial encouragement from the state to make annotating worthwhile?