Following up on the SCOTUS hearing concerning Georgia’s attempt to put its laws’ annotations behind a paywall:
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Malamud, saying that Georgia state laws and their official annotations, like all other works authored by judges or legislators, are not copyrightable. The decision came down to a 5–4 split between the court’s youngest five justices (John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh) and its four oldest members (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg). [Slate]
Why are annotations important?
Georgia minimizes the OCGA annotations as non-binding and non-authoritative, but that description undersells their practical significance. Imagine a Georgia citizen interested in learning his legal rights and duties. If he reads the economy-class version of the Georgia Code available online, he will see laws requiring political candidates to pay hefty qualification fees (with no indigency exception), criminalizing broad categories of consensual sexual conduct, and exempting certain key evidence in criminal trials from standard evidentiary limitations—with no hint that important aspects of those laws have been held unconstitutional by the Georgia Supreme Court. … Meanwhile, first-class readers with access to the annotations will be assured that these laws are, in crucial respects, unenforceable relics that the legislature has not bothered to narrow or repeal. [SCOTUS]
The poor legislators in Georgia might have to raise taxes to cover publishing costs – I hope no one has a stroke at the horror of it all.
Symptomatic of the extremism characteristic of the GOP – or, at least, that’s how it strikes me – these days is this:
[In 2013], Carl Malamud, the founder of nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org, decided to do something similar with Georgia state laws. However, he took a different route. He purchased a hard copy of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated for more than $1,200 from LexisNexis, scanned it, and sent USB drives with two copies of the entire state code to several Georgia legislators. He also posted it online, prompting the state of Georgia to sue him for copyright infringement in a lawsuit that memorably accused Malamud of “terrorism,” stating, “Consistent with its strategy of terrorism, Defendant freely admits to the copying and distribution of massive numbers of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Annotations on at least its https://yeswescan.org website.” [Slate]
Yep, terrorism. It’s not surprising, of course, in view of a primary fight of a couple of years ago that featured far-right Rep Brooks (R-AL) being accused of being a supporter of ISIS. There was a time when governance, including bringing suit, was viewed with some sobriety, but that appears to have gone into abeyance for the time being.
In any case, congrats to Malamud. He’s done a service for the people of Alabama, and perhaps a few other states, if I read the dissent properly (which otherwise seemed quite technical and beyond my poor skills).
