I want to be shocked that 4 SC Justices thought that those annotations were copyrightable. How is this not obviously public data? Legislatures are on our payroll and work for the people.

If you have an hour to kill, it could be worth taking a look at the dissents in order to see their reasoning. The justices (/their clerks) are very good writers and decisions and dissents are pretty easy for a layperson to follow.

Most people don't have an hour to kill, and frequently use common sense to judge egregious violations of this kind.

Many people get very upset and spend a lot of time complaining about how egregious the laws are that they have read about, without spending any time to actually read and understand the law in question.

These are often the same people who will rail against the patent system every time they see a patent issue with a broad title, completely ignoring that the patent is only for a very small improvement over the prior art.

> Most people don't have an hour to kill, and frequently use common sense to judge egregious violations

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.

I don't believe the rigor or integrity of an argument lies in who produced it or how much time or space it took to articulate.

I read 2 of the 20 pages of the dissent and the dissent in Wikipedia. And guess what, the common sense judgement was correct.

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.

> I suspect I have read more than everyone else in this thread

You read two pages and a Wikipedia article. Come on.

Has anyone else read more than me - someone read all the 20 pages and all the precedents cited?!. Feel free to raise your hand. All of this detailed readings of ridiculous dissents reminds me of a joke.

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!"

> Has anyone else read more than me - someone read all the 20 pages and all the precedents cited?

“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.

Like I said it smelled like shit and it is indeed shit. I don't plan on rolling around in it.

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.

I can't tell you how sick I'm getting of people bragging about what they haven't read.

A summary of the dissenting opinions is in the Wikipedia article linked above.

While you are correct and it would be more accurate to call them 'impulsive reactions based on limited information' than 'common sense' - that doesn't make it a good thing. And in fact it's quite bad. Though Reddit has about 90% of their comments to thank for people doing that. They react based on the title of an article, without reading said article, nor the facts the article is based on - and other people arguing with them about their reaction.

Dissents begin on page 22 [1].

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-1150_7m58.pdf

Majority: Roberts, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh

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

Woof, if this would've happened in 2022 it would've probably gone the other way since Sotomoyer got replaced with a very conservative justice (Barret)

Sotomayor is still on the Court. Barrett replaced Ginsburg, who you’ll notice dissented here. Breyer was also replaced this year (with another liberal).

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.

It’s not so obvious. The annotations weren’t produced by the legislature and do not have the force of law. In a way they’re like any other law book that collects together public opinions and statutes with explanatory text, which are definitely copyrightable. The wrinkle in this case was that the legislature contracted with a private company to add the annotations:

> 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.

> The ... do not have the force of law

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.

It’s not wrong, but I’m this context “authoritative” doesn’t mean the whole thing is “legally operative.”

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.

They wouldn't include the commentary in their official copies if they didn't intend for it to affect how the law is interpreted. That makes "legislation" vs "explanatory notes" a meaningless distinction. It has a direct effect on the actions of people with guns and badges, therefore we the people have a right to know.

How does it work in the US? Do the different legislatures typically publish their own law books or is that typically up to private ventures to handle?

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.

Here in Germany new laws used to be published in print by the legislature. However recently they switched the authoritative copy to a digital online version.

For Malamud's similar case about building codes, the logical verdicts might be that privately-created text aimed at being building code does have copyright protection, but that it does not have the force of binding law until it has been put into the public domain by the government through agreement with the copyright holder. Getting a test case for this would be quite difficult though, as inspectors are notorious for exercising autocratic power and getting away with it.

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.

In America it has become acceptable to reduced ever choice as between capitalism or burning it to the ground.

It has become encouraged. Both the government and the insurance companies would be happy for insurance to determine de facto law. Insurance companies would certainly take advantage of that power to help their bottom line, and government would tell insurance companies to dictate things that it couldn't pass or were even unconstitutional for government to have a say in.

> In a way they’re like any other law book that collects together public opinions and statutes with explanatory text, which are definitely copyrightable.

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.

That would depend on the restrictions accompanying the money. The federal government has had mixed success funding technology projects. The Feds aren’t necessarily experts at solving state/local-level problems.

>>The annotations weren’t produced by the legislature and do not have the force of law

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

It’s like the difference between the ISO C++ specification and “the C++ Programming Language” book. The book will help you understand the specification, but the specification stands alone.

My understanding of the issue not like that at all, to extend your analogy it would be like if ISO published the Spec, but then every compiler used things only found in the C++ Programming Book to compile your programs, and any error codes were only found in the book

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.

like how ISO publishes drafts for free, but charges for the final specification, so everyone just ends up implementing the most recent draft?

No. What dinged GA is that they incorporated the annotations into the law.

Other states contract West and Lexis to annotate, but those annotations aren’t incorporated.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was such a justice who thought prison was allowable for publishing the law.

What a hero!

It's worrisome that it was split 5-4 on the issue of copyright with something that was paid for with tax dollars.

It’s interesting to note that this decision did not come down along typical ideological lines either. The majority was three conservatives and two liberals, while the minority was two conservatives and two liberals.