[roderickm]

Judge Story "went on to acknowledge the Georgia situation is 'an unusual case because most official codes are not annotated and most annotated codes are not official.' Despite the fact the OCGA is official law, the judge said its annotations are entitled to copyright. The Georgia General Assembly has made clear 'that the OCGA contains both law and commentary,' Story wrote, and the two are distinguishable."

Removing commentary or replacing with original commentary would abridge the official code.

If LexisNexis should be compensated for the value they added, then the state should pay them for that value, just as they pay the legislators to write the law. The resulting code should be freely available to every citizen bound by it.

[csneeky]

Could not agree more. I think this is a great point and I hope Georgia does what it can to renegotiate whatever deal it made to this end (making it all clear and free) when it gets the chance. If that is indeed the problem here.