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

Ginsburg daughter is a copyright law scholar who is very pro-copyright. Ginsburg's decisions tend to be very reliably pro-copyright on a court where consistency on copyright matters is utterly lacking among all the other justices. As compared to Ginsburg, it's a crap shoot how any particular justice will decide a copyright case.

I personally don't think this is a coincidence. I would guess that Ginsburg's thinking is heavily influenced by conversations with her daughter. Or perhaps Ginsburg's strongly held opinions on copyright influenced her daughter's career.

Whether you agree with or disagree with the Citizens United outcome, describing the majority opinion as a straightforward "completely wrong" (when, for example, the ACLU supported the verdict) indicates that you have not, in fact, read any of the opinions or dissents, or done research about the specific case that was being litigated.

Per the decision, the un-annotated code is made freely available.[0] The issue at hand is the annotations.

The majority opinion is that the key point is authorship. Officials whose work has the force of law (aka judges and legislators) cannot be authors for purposes of copyright of any work produced in their official capacity as a lawmaker. Their argument is that the annotations are published by the legislative body of Georgia in an official capacity, and therefore are not subject to copyright.

The first dissent disagrees with the majority's interpretation of the government edicts doctrine (lawmakers cannot be authors of, and therefore cannot hold copyright on, works produced in the discharge of their lawmaking duties), finding it too broad and not obvious. The core point is that the type of work matters, and that in this case the type of work is not legislative.

The second dissent argues also that the type of work matters, and that annotations such as those under consideration do not created in a legislative capacity. This agrees with the majority argument about the government edicts doctrine, but disagrees about whether this work constitutes a government edict.

[0] This is mentioned spanning the bottom of page three and the top of page four of the majority opinion (pages six and seven of the PDF):

> In exchange, Lexis has agreed to limit the price it may charge for the OCGA and to make an unannotated version of the statutory text available to the public online for free.

Aside from the particulars of this case, I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking, as codified in the laws and time limits being inflated grossly to suit copyright holders in the current era.

In my opinion, the argument that copyright extension incentivizes authors/creators doesn't hold much water. I generally observe that there are plenty of people willing to create and publish things with absolutely no hope of profit or legal protection, and yet we bend over backwards to extend our protections for the lucky few to the tune of the author's life + 70 years. Even more if for hire. Tell me how that's in the public interest.

> 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

Where do you fit Italy, Spain, or even Portugal in your logica analysis? Because arguably the US is being hit harder than any of those countries and yet they are respecting their quarantine with notable results.

Meanwhile, neither Germany nor Sweden has suffered as much as neither Spain or Italy.