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Comment by amerine | Hacker News Reader

It’s a welcome decision, but a very obvious one. Why did Georgia need to get told that we, the people, own the laws?

As a lawyer, I can chime in here. Annotated statutes are special. They have cross references to the cases which cite to the statutes. So if you're doing research on a statute, the annotated version will have the letter of the law word for word, then at the bottom it will have a little topical index (with topics based on a part of the statute) under each topic will be the cases citation which addressed that topic and a brief 1-2 line description of what that case held. Generally, one of the publishers puts them together instead of the state because it takes a lot of legwork and constant updating as new cases interpret the statute. State laws and statutes are obviously not something you can claim is your intellectual property but when they're annotated you are actually reading a lot of stuff that isn't the just the statute.

Annotated statutes should only be special when created by others. A state's annotation carries significantly more weight: it bears an official status, and it should have been obvious that the state's official interpretation, though not completely binding, still constitutes critical information necessary for citizens to know and understand the laws they are expected to live by.

I agree. Unfortunately, it is really looked down on by judges when you cite to an annotated statute because the annotation it isn't generally considered law. Obviously, this case may change that in Georgia (maybe elsewhere). I'd certainly try to cite to annotated statutes if the US supreme court said the authors were legislators.

So why did Georgia feel the need to anoint this one the official annotated code?

There is obviously a market for annotations, what stopped LexisNexis from just doing the annotations on it's own initiative and selling the result itself?

What doomed their copyright is that they took state money to do it. Is it just corruption and they figured they can charge both sides?

> There is obviously a market for annotations, what stopped LexisNexis from just doing the annotations on it's own initiative and selling the result itself?

Because the annotations angle is a red herring? In the Oyez transcript of oral argument[1], Citron (for the respondent) made what I believe to be a relevant remark disputing the petitioners' assertion that legal annotations would be more expensive:

> One is the actual useful versions of these codes are already plenty expensive. There's a lot of discussion of the cost for a printed volume, but online access, which is what really most practitioners need to use, most people want to use, it's much more expensive than the $400. But, even accepting that the price is lower, I think that favors us, because what's going on there is an exchange of -- you're going to accept a price cap in exchange for the right to publish this officially, not for publishing the annotations, because Westlaw makes the annotations and is allowed to charge six times as much. Lexis isn't going to agree to do the annotation work in exchange for a price cap. What it wants for the price cap is the right to publish it officially.

As I understand the game being played prior to this decision (to be sure, IANAL): although annotations undoubtedly have market value, the market (for liability and other reasons) will nevertheless tend towards official sources, and if you're the official publisher granted monopoly, who cares if the thing being sold has a price cap ($?) when the subscription to the service that provides access to said official thing won't ($$!)...and even if said subscription cost was pragmatically constrained by market forces, the dragnet scales from typical legal/government/academic players in the arena to capturing a proverbial crap ton of otherwise unmarketable endusers on the receiving end of the law ($$$!) while taking share away from direct competitors ($$$$!!). Then make a free, unofficial version available in an attempt to pacify public dissent, but seed a mandatory disclaimer that it may contain errors, so anyone with skin in the game who can pony up will be compelled to do so.

[1] https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/18-1150

As somebody who definitely is not reading law, another facet of this is that while the Federal Government is prohibited from holding copyrights, same prohibition isn't fully incorporated to the States and certainly not to the rest of the local authorities. Wikipedia's overview [0] is nice.

The principle is obvious, and so while I can understand the dissenters' line of reasoning somewhat, it's absolutely flabbergasting to read some of their bullshit. Here's Thomas:

> Lastly, the annotations do not impede fair notice of the laws. As just stated, the annotations do not carry the binding force of of law. They simply summarize independent sources of legal information and consolidate them in one place. ... The majority resists this conclusion, suggesting that without access to the annotations, readers of Georgia law will be unable to fully understand the true meaning of Georgia's statutory provisions, such as provisions that have been undermined or nullified by court decisions. That is simply incorrect. As the majority tacitly concedes, a person seeking information about changes in Georgia statutory law can find that information by consulting the original source for the change in the law's status -- the court decisions themselves.

How magnanimous! It's appalling that this is the opinion of one of our top jurists: Want to practice law in Georgia? Better go find it, and hope you find all of it. But wait, there's more!

> The majority's rule will leave in the lurch the many researchers who relied on the previously bright-line rule. Perhaps, to the detriment of all, many States will stop producing annotated codes altogether. Were that to occur, the majority's fear of an "economy-class" version of the law will truly become a reality. ... For example, Georgia asserts that Lexis sold the OCGA for $404 in 2016, while West Publishing's competing annotated code sold for $2,570. Should state annotated codes disappear, those without the means to pay the competitor's significantly higher price tag will have a valuable research tool taken away from them.

Cry me a river! Listen to this shit: He thinks that the law will get more expensive if we don't let Lexis keep taking a cut. No, the law ought to be free, and the state ought to bend over backwards (or forwards) to ensure that the law is published so widely and legibly that there truly is no excuse for not being able to access it. The twenty-five states across the USA that currently publish annotated codes are in for a bit of a rude awakening, as they will be asked to stop dicking their citizens.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t...

The dissenting judges would tell you that the laws are not copyright, the annotations are, which, although important to understanding the law, are not the law.

But while they aren't the law, they hold the power of law as the annotations are used by judges to decide cases.

As the majority opinion and one dissenting opinion explain, whether a work has the force of law is not the test. If it were, dissenting judicial opinions would be copyrightable, but they're not. The rule is that works produced by judges or legislators acting in their official capacities are not copyrightable. In this case, the annotations were works-for-hire of the legislature; whether they have the force of law is irrelevant.

There's a little more to it than that -- "the laws" are clearly beyond the reach of copyright and have been forever.

What this case is about was some kind of annotated version of the statutes that included case notes and precedents and such. Georgia tried to claim that was subject to copyright. The Justices disagreed, claiming that the annotations were primarily created by legislators in the course of doing legislative work, and thus also could not be copyrighted.

This Amicus brief from other states aligned with Georgia attempts to explain the rationale:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-1150/114285/201...

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