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Comment by mhb | Hacker News Reader

It's a terrible article. My understanding is that the state has an agreement with Lexis/Nexis to have the laws annotated. In exchange Lexis/Nexis can publish and sell the annotations. Presumably, in order for this relationship to continue, the state must defend its copyright to the annotations which Lexis/Nexis has produced.

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.

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> It's a terrible article. My understanding is that the state has an agreement with Lexis/Nexis to have the laws annotated. In exchange Lexis/Nexis can publish and sell the annotations. Presumably, in order for this relationship to continue, the state must defend its copyright to the annotations which Lexis/Nexis has produced.

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?

I think the issue here is that the Georgia courts cite these annotations in their opinions, meaning that they effectively have the weight of law. If there is no de facto difference between an annotation and a law, why can one be copyrighted and hidden behind a paywall while the other cannot?

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.

The state should have developed its own annotations or paid Lexis/Nexis to make the annotations public, not have them in this messy limbo state.

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