First, laws cannot be copyrighted. They're in the public domain.

Second, the case you link to was not about laws, but annotated law. The annotated version (OCGA) was written by LexisNexis, and all that work paid for by LexisNexis. Obviously, normally that would mean LexisNexis has the copyright on the annotations. This is unproblematic.

Another organization (Public.Resource.Org) posted the OCGA online. Georgia sued, arguing the annotations were the work of LexisNexis and therefore obviously copyrighted. But the problem was that Georgia had declared the annotations to be official.

The Supreme Court found this act of making them official made them essentially the law itself, and therefore uncopyrightable. Which meant LexisNexis had done all that expensive work for free, whoops.

So it's a weird edge case where Georgia should either not have accorded any special status to the annotations, or should have paid for annotations themselves if they wanted "official" ones, and made them public domain.

1. In the UK, Royal Mail owns the postal addresses data. I was looking at UK's open datasets - apparently lot of datasets that have addresses can't be used without paying Royal Mail. There are some exceptions - but I am no lawyer. It is depressing to learn that Royal Mail is no longer a public institution, it was sold against public will by the UK government to a private entity, and sold again and as of last year it is owned by a Czech billionaire. Similarly, Canadian postal code database is also not free.

2. CPT code descriptions are owned by AMA (apparently they're super litigious?). Sure they took the time to write them, they should be compensated - but imagine how many interesting projects can be built if this data was freely available

On one hand, multi Billion dollar companies like Bloomberg exist, thanks to free and open data. But also things that should be free (dictionaries, postal codes etc) aren't.