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Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

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Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#31

Post by tyre »

LiquidSky wrote: post #25
huffmsa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely more than a few partisan court cases, but most of them are very very logical. Even when it's a partisan, ideological split.

Ha. The trick is that what's "logical" and what's "partisan" depend entirely on who is speaking, like how cries of "judicial activism" only ever arise when it's a ruling against a conservative position. If it's a ruling FOR the conservative position, it's obviously logical and sound, and possibly correcting previous evil irrational liberal decisions.

This is an easy take if you don't follow the court. The cases that tend to get a lot of press tend to be ones with clear ideological lines.

But not every case is divided 5–4 along the line of which party nominated the justice. There are a lot of ideological currents that don't fit cleanly into political parties

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#32

Post by golemotron »

tyre wrote: post #27
matheusmoreira wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean this is not the norm? The cases I've read seemed quite reasonable. They happened in the 90s and early 2000s though.

I read a few case opinions per year. There are ones that are partisan but on the whole are incredibly well thought through, argued, and written. There are some disasters, but even then you get beautiful rebuttals (e.g. Kagan's dissent in Rucho v. Common Cause)

It's even more impressive when you realize that in many cases the opinions are largely researched and written by clerks.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#33

Post by wahern »

simcop2387 wrote: post #29
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dissenting judges would tell you that the laws are not copyright, the annotations are, which, although important to understanding the law, are not the law.

But while they aren't the law, they hold the power of law as the annotations are used by judges to decide cases.

As the majority opinion and one dissenting opinion explain, whether a work has the force of law is not the test. If it were, dissenting judicial opinions would be copyrightable, but they're not. The rule is that works produced by judges or legislators acting in their official capacities are not copyrightable. In this case, the annotations were works-for-hire of the legislature; whether they have the force of law is irrelevant.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#34

Post by tzs »

I had never heard of the "government edicts doctrine" before. Doing a little research, I see why. It is a judicially created doctrine created by the Supreme Court ~130 years ago, and this is the first time since then it has been back to the Court.

What they decided way back then was that opinions of state court judges, like opinions of Federal court judges, were not copyrightable. They also decided a little later that annotations written by a state-employed annotator where the state did not claim copyright on the annotator's work could be copyrighted by the annotator.

What's new in this case compared to those cases that originally established the government edicts doctrine is that it was a state that was trying to assert copyright ownership of the annotations.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#35

Post by bsder »

ISL wrote: post #10

Reading the opinions, it is a breath of fresh air to see one of the branches of government relying upon fact and logical argument when discussing the issues. This is how America is supposed to work.

> Reading the opinions, it is a breath of fresh air to see one of the branches of government relying upon fact and logical argument when discussing the issues.

Your optimism is refreshing, but this is not how law works.

Judges and lawyers start from a conclusion, and then find case law to back up their conclusion.

Now, to be fair, most judges and lawyers who are competent tend not to go far off the established precedents. This is especially true at lower levels where higher judges are going to review your case--nobody wants to be the judge who gets overturned all the time.

Judges are not engineers. The law regards "truth" as subject to negotiation without objective boundaries. An engineer regards "truth" as "the thing that kicks your ass when you contradict it".

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#36

Post by Redoubts »

ulkesh wrote: post #28
matheusmoreira wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean this is not the norm? The cases I've read seemed quite reasonable. They happened in the 90s and early 2000s though.

It may be the norm, but they also get some completely wrong: Citizens United, for example.

What if it's right, but the constitution is wrong?

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#37

Post by huffmsa »

Redoubts wrote: post #36
ulkesh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be the norm, but they also get some completely wrong: Citizens United, for example.

What if it's right, but the constitution is wrong?

Then you follow the procedure outlined in article 5 to amend the Constitution.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#38

Post by rayiner »

ISL wrote: post #10

Reading the opinions, it is a breath of fresh air to see one of the branches of government relying upon fact and logical argument when discussing the issues. This is how America is supposed to work.

The judicial branch is supposed to rely on facts and logical arguments. That is not how “America” writ large, however, is “supposed to work.” If that’s what the framers anticipated, they would have have had the other two branches likewise run by unelected subject matter experts with life tenure. But they didn’t.

The fact is that the world is too complicated to figure out via facts and logical analysis, and that’s why ultimate control of policy rests with elected politicians. We’re seeing this play out at a grand scale right now. In the US, classes are cancelled for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, German students went back to school a week ago. And in Sweden, lower schools were never even shut down in the first place. Logical analysis doesn’t tell you what are the appropriate trade offs between keeping the economy running and keeping people safe. What the purposes of the welfare state should be isn’t a fact waiting to be discovered through empirical methods. These are all political judgments. Even where facts and logical analysis could play a role, it often doesn’t, because experts don’t agree on often very simple facts, or the experts’ answers are too complicated to be actionable.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#39

Post by imapluralistyep »

amerine wrote: post #5

It’s a welcome decision, but a very obvious one. Why did Georgia need to get told that we, the people, own the laws?

As a lawyer, I can chime in here. Annotated statutes are special. They have cross references to the cases which cite to the statutes. So if you're doing research on a statute, the annotated version will have the letter of the law word for word, then at the bottom it will have a little topical index (with topics based on a part of the statute) under each topic will be the cases citation which addressed that topic and a brief 1-2 line description of what that case held. Generally, one of the publishers puts them together instead of the state because it takes a lot of legwork and constant updating as new cases interpret the statute. State laws and statutes are obviously not something you can claim is your intellectual property but when they're annotated you are actually reading a lot of stuff that isn't the just the statute.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#40

Post by rayiner »

ulkesh wrote: post #28
matheusmoreira wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean this is not the norm? The cases I've read seemed quite reasonable. They happened in the 90s and early 2000s though.

It may be the norm, but they also get some completely wrong: Citizens United, for example.

Citizens United was obviously correct. (While it’s not dispositive, look up which side the ACLU supported in that case.)
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