Supreme Court Rules Annotated State Legal Codes Cannot Be Copyrighted
The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that copyright protection does not apply to annotations in state's annotated legal code. The ruling in Georgia v. Public Resource.Org affects 23 states, two territories and Washington, D.C. PIJIP Professor Peter Jaszi commented that “This is the beginning of the end of a long journey toward opening all judicial and legislative materials to the public – the modern stage of which began more than thirty-five years ago in the West Publishing cases. The struggle to open governmental information at every level of the administrative state continues.”