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

Second of all, in practice, the influence of money in politics is overstated.

Hillary Clinton outspent[1][2] Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing[3][4] than Donald Trump, and still lost.

In the 2020 Democratic Primaries, Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion[5] (!!) on his campaign, and won just 9.4% of the popular vote (1.38% of pledged delegates).

Tom Steyer (a no-name billionaire), spent $343 million[6] on his election, and won a humiliating 0.38% of the popular vote (0% of pledged delegates). Interestingly, you would think he would have at least 1/3 of Bloomberg's vote, which suggests that the vast majority of the variance in Bloomberg's vote share can be attributed to his existing name recognition as a famous businessman/politician.

Bernie Sanders spent $195 million[7] on his election, having spent less than Bloomberg + Steyer and while having handily beaten both. Joe Biden spent $105 million[8] on his campaign, less than Bernie, and still beat him by 3 million votes.

Elizabeth Warren spent $121.31 million[9] on her campaign, and also handily beat Bloomberg + Steyer while having spent far less than them, while losing to Biden while having spent more than him.

Those are just the anecdotes (of which there are many more).

Decades of research[10] suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research in the last century found[11] that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear[12]. Even the studies[13] that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money actually causes wins. In fact, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to change their vote because they liked your ad.

So this argument is dubious both legally as well as prescriptively.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=n00000019

[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=n00023864

[3] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/contributors?id=n00000019

[4] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/contributors?id=n00023864

[5] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/candidate...

[6] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/candidate...

[7] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/candidate...

[8] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/candidate...

[9] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/candidate...

[10] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2605401

[11] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002764203260415

[12] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138764?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...

[13] http://www.sas.rochester.edu/psc/clarke/214/Gerber98.pdf

It is difficult to make an argument from a negative, but it is interesting to note that no one seems to care that Lexis distributes the text.

Also, if you go to Georgia's legislative web site and click on the link for "Georgia Code"[0], this takes you directly to Lexis Nexis. This seems as official as anything you'll find. The fact that a government contracts a third party to provide a service does not imply that that government is failing to provide said service.

As an analog, if I am a landlord, I am required to maintain any premises I let in a state that is fit for humans to live in. Whether I hire third party contractors to do the work to maintain these conditions or do the work myself, I am discharging my duties as landlord. No one would ever complain that I hired a plumber rather than fixed a toilet myself (assuming that the work is of the same quality).

[0] left-side nav bar, under "Legislation" heading, second from the bottom of its section.

Edit: I'll note that the arrangement as laid out in the syllabus of the Supreme Court decision reads differently than that in the Ars article. The syllabus clearly states that the annotations are produced as a work for hire by a division of Lexis for the Georgia Assembly in a contract managed through the Code Revision Commission (a committee of the Georgia legislature). The copyright vests in the state of Georgia. The Ars article implies (based on my reading) that the copyright belongs to Lexis. These two readings provide very different starting points.

Separately, the Ars article raises FUD about the copy of the statutes hosted on the Lexis website, but the state of Georgia clearly links to this as the code. Lexis, as a third party without the ability to make law (and as an organization of lawyers) has some hedges it probably has to make when posting legal documents. Georgia claims this is the official text of the statutes. I'll defer to Georgia on this matter and accept the Lexis text as canonical.

(unless the game was being made for free as a hobby and the kickstarted was just for fun and not actually funding).