Georgia had paid LexisNexis to annotate their laws and the annotated version became the authoritative copy. The state then asserted copyright over the annotations.
In 2020, SCOTUS decided 5-4 that legal annotations that are created by legislatures are ineligible for copyright.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_v._Public.Resource.Org....
Most people aren’t lawyers or justices. This is specialisation of labor. If it doesn’t matter enough to spend a fraction of the time reading an option that took orders of magnitude more time to produce, the lazy opinion is a hunch, nothing more.
Thomas dissent involved clerical, Kafkaesque beuracratic objections while fundamentally ignoring the right of a citizen to know the law. The very notion of selling the copyright for laws and judgements to a monopoly private party is ridiculous. The other objection is the grievance that a private party can't profit off annotations. Again, quite laughable. The court can simply pay a fee to any private party that helps with annotation. There is also a ridiculous idea in there that granting a monopoly will improve the quality of annotations (through the lack of competition?!!!!) This is high school level reasoning.
Yeah, the dissents were ridiculous and not worth the time I spent reading them.
Others are free to waste their time like I did, but would advise them not to. They should simply ignore the dissent as it is ridiculous. It can help in lowering the prestige of the Supreme court, but the abortion judgement based off "states rights" already took care of that. The Supreme court sounds like a political jerk fest at this point.
At this point, I suspect I have read more than everyone else in this thread. And it was a waste, except that it helped me question Thomas's sanity.
You read two pages and a Wikipedia article. Come on.
A guy sees a pile of shit and steps aside and walks away.
Another guy comes along and says "Looks like shit, but can't say for sure"
Then he gets close to the shit on the sidewalk and smells it
"Smells like shit - can't be too sure though"
Then he licks it and tastes it "tastes like shit, can't be sure though"
He picks it up and takes it to a lab. The results come back - it is indeed shit.
He breathes a sigh of relief "It is shit! Thank God, I didn't step on it!"
“Stepping aside and walking away” is what most people do. You’ve taken the most cursory of looks at a complicated argument and declared as shit something with legal complexity obviously beyond your domain of expertise. Instead of curiosity you chose proud ignorance.
Do you have any specific objections to the summary I have stated, because honestly you haven't even read half as much as I did. Which is why the entirety of your argument is meta and content free and makes no reference to the actual dissent. You seem to be offended by ignorance, but between the 2 of us you are the one who is more ignorant and have offered no opinion on the dissent apart from hot takes about me.
The only thing you can learn from reading the dissent is that Thomas is ignorant as hell.
Or are you going for the angle that my opinion doesn't matter as long as I haven't earned a law clerkship at a prestigious place. And I should just keep on reading and reading for several years and not express an opinion on something as ridiculous as denying the residents and tax payers the ability to make a copy of the law.
These are often the same people who will rail against the patent system every time they see a patent with a broad title, completely ignoring that the patent is only for a very small improvement over the prior art.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-1150_7m58.pdf
Dissent: Thomas, joined by Alito; Breyer (all but Part II–A and footnote 6)
Dissent: Ginsburg, joined by Breyer
---
For non-Americans, from most conservative to most liberal:
Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, Ginsburg, Kagan, Breyer, Sotomoyor
Copyright is one of those issues that is not necessarily clear‐cut between left and right, but more of an opinion specific to an individual justice. In this case, the majority and the dissents were each roughly evenly split between conservatives and liberals, not along (those) ideological lines.
> The Commission entered into a work-for-hire agreement with Matthew Bender & Co., Inc., a division of the LexisNexis Group, to prepare annotations
Allowing the private company to keep the copyright was basically a way for the legislature trying to get this work done on the cheap. After all if the legislature had told LexisNexis that the work would be public domain, it probably would have had to pay (or pay more) for LexisNexis to do the work.
This is typical. There’s myriad ways where the government can get some product or service for less money, or less money up front, by giving up some public right of privilege. The number of people who care about this sort of open government stuff is, unfortunately, pretty limited. I don’t think I know a single person outside HN who mentioned this case when it was pending or decided. And I work in Supreme Court practice! Also, this sort of thing is kinda Georgia’s MO. It attracts residents and businesses from Illinois and New York by having lower taxes. That often means cutting corners on things like this.
So you're saying this part
> the annotated version became the authoritative copy
is wrong?
Either way, you're describing a situation where the state cheaped out in a way that deprives its residents of their right to know what law governs them. I still call that obvious.
Here is an example (reckless driving): https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2020/title-40/chapter-6...
The first part, subsections (a) and (b) is the actual law. That’s the only legally operative part that defines what reckless driving is. In most states, that is the only thing that is published.
The following sections are explanatory notes that don’t have the force of law and are not law. For example, it cross references relevant case law. In other states private companies will create these annotated versions of the legal code with these cross references, and those are definitely copyrightable.
Here in Scandinavia it seems the governments and other legislative authorities publish laws and rules on their home pages and it is then up to the publishers to keep track of what to put in the law book. Or not, because there are too many laws so a selection has to be made as it won't fit in a single volume. Different publishers then have different selections and annotations.
It might also lead to the terrible situation where states just give up on building codes, but insurance companies continue to require them, creating de facto law through the backdoor of involuntary contracts.
If they're commissioned by Georgia, it would make more sense for them to be bound to explicit terms that require their work to go into the public domain. Shame on Georgia for not demanding/negotiating it that way upfront. IMO if their work becomes the text that legislators ultimately consult when considering new legislation, that deliberation should be public. If LexisNexis can't do it under those terms and no one else bids, Georgia should fund the work themselves.
Though I think it would be really excellent for the federal government to fund commercial open source software projects to satisfy the needs of state and local governments. So many of them have such uniform operations that you could accomplish a great deal by optimizing for the majority case.
Well i believe they did, but it really comes down to if the annotations where needed to understand the law.
There are only 2 options here
1. The full public code including the annotations needed to understand the code is freely accessible to the public
2. Ignorance of the law becomes a valid defense
This is why the ruling by the court was the correct one
To bring it back to the Law, the official code was the Annotated Version which means that is what Judges, and Prosecutors would be referencing when looking at if you broke the law, what sentence you have, etc.
Other states contract West and Lexis to annotate, but those annotations aren’t incorporated.
What a hero!