Georgia v. Public Resource.Org, Inc.
206 L. Ed. 2d 732, 140 S. Ct. 1498 (2020)
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Rule of Law:
Under the government edicts doctrine, works created by judges and legislators in the course of their official duties are not copyrightable. This rule applies regardless of whether the work itself has the force of law.
Facts:
- The State of Georgia designates the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA) as its single official code.
- The OCGA contains the text of Georgia's statutes as well as non-binding annotations, which include summaries of judicial decisions, attorney general opinions, and law review articles.
- A state entity, the Code Revision Commission, is tasked with assembling the OCGA. A majority of the Commission's members are required to be members of the Georgia Legislature.
- The Commission entered into a work-for-hire agreement with Matthew Bender & Co., a division of LexisNexis, to prepare the annotations. The agreement specifies that the copyright in the OCGA vests in the State of Georgia.
- The Commission provides detailed specifications for and supervises the creation of the annotations by LexisNexis.
- Each year, the Georgia Legislature votes to enact the statutory text, merge it with the annotations, and publish the combined work as the OCGA.
- Public.Resource.Org (PRO), a nonprofit organization, posted a digital version of the entire OCGA online for free public access without permission from Georgia.
Procedural Posture:
- The Georgia Code Revision Commission sued Public.Resource.Org, Inc. (PRO) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia for copyright infringement.
- PRO counterclaimed, seeking a declaratory judgment that the entire OCGA, including the annotations, was in the public domain.
- The District Court granted partial summary judgment to the Commission, holding that the annotations were copyrightable because they lacked the force of law, and issued a permanent injunction against PRO.
- PRO, as the appellant, appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, with the Commission as the appellee.
- The Eleventh Circuit reversed the District Court's judgment, holding that the annotations were uncopyrightable 'government edicts' attributable to the 'constructive authorship of the People.'
- The Commission, as petitioner, was granted a writ of certiorari by the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Issue:
Does the government edicts doctrine prevent a state from copyrighting annotations included in its official statutory code when those annotations are prepared by a legislative body in the course of its official duties?
Opinions:
Majority - Chief Justice Roberts
Yes. The government edicts doctrine prevents a state from copyrighting annotations that are authored by a legislative body in the course of its official duties. The doctrine, rooted in the Copyright Act's 'authorship' requirement, holds that officials empowered to speak with the force of law, such as judges and legislators, cannot be the 'authors' of works they create in their official capacities. The key inquiry is the identity of the author, not whether the resulting work has the force of law. Here, the Code Revision Commission is the statutory author of the annotations under a work-for-hire agreement. The Commission functions as an arm of the Georgia Legislature, as evidenced by its composition, funding, and the nature of its duties as defined by state law. Because the Commission authors the annotations in the course of its official legislative duties, the annotations are not copyrightable.
Dissenting - Justice Thomas
No. The government edicts doctrine should not prevent the copyrighting of annotations that do not have the force of law. The doctrine's historical purpose is to ensure public access to materials that constitute the law, such as statutes and binding judicial opinions, for reasons of fair notice. The OCGA annotations are explicitly not law; they are reference materials analogous to the copyrightable headnotes prepared by a court reporter in Callaghan v. Myers. The majority's 'official duties' test is an expansion of precedent that fails to consider the critical distinction between works with legal force and those without, and it creates an unworkable standard that disrupts the settled practices of numerous states.
Dissenting - Justice Ginsburg
No. The government edicts doctrine does not apply because the creation of the OCGA annotations is not an exercise of legislative duty. A legislator's core function is lawmaking—the process of creating and enacting laws. The annotations, however, are created after the laws are enacted, are descriptive summaries of external materials like court cases rather than prescriptive statements of legislative intent, and serve as a reference for the public, not as part of the law-formulation process. Because annotating existing statutes is auxiliary to and separate from a legislator's law-shaping capacity, the resulting work should be copyrightable.
Analysis:
This decision significantly clarifies and expands the government edicts doctrine by shifting the focus from the legal status of the work to the official status of its author. By holding that the identity of the author (a judge or legislator acting in an official capacity) is the dispositive factor, the Court placed a wide range of non-binding legal materials, such as official annotations and commentary, into the public domain. The ruling impacts states that use exclusive publishing contracts, financed by copyright, to produce their annotated codes, potentially requiring new models for creating and disseminating these essential legal resources. It strengthens the principle of open access to legal materials by ensuring that works created through the legislative process are freely available to the public.
