Georgia, oh Georgia, you can’t charge for access to laws
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If you want people to follow the laws you need to tell them what they are, no?
Essentially, that’s what the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday told the state, upholding the right to freely share the official law code of Georgia. The state had claimed it had copyright to code, offering it online through Lexis-Nexis for a fee, according to the tech news site Arstechnica.com.
Georgia had sued the nonprofit Public.Resource.Org for publishing the Official Code of Georgia Annotated online for free, according to the website.
Monday's ruling is “not only a victory for the open-government group, it's an important precedent that will help secure the right to publish other legally significant public documents,” the website states.
"Officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of — and therefore cannot copyright — the works they create in the course of their official duties," the opinion, accessed by Arstechnica, states.
The state of Georgia had argued that it could copyright annotations that are distributed with the official code “because the annotations provide supplemental information about the law, including summaries of judicial opinions, information about legislative history, and citations to relevant law review articles,” according to the site.
