[crazygringo]

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make?

First, laws cannot be copyrighted. They're in the public domain.

Second, the case you link to was not about laws, but annotated law. The annotated version (OCGA) was written by LexisNexis, and all that work paid for by LexisNexis. Obviously, normally that would mean LexisNexis has the copyright on the annotations. This is unproblematic.

Another organization (Public.Resource.Org) posted the OCGA online. Georgia sued, arguing the annotations were the work of LexisNexis and therefore obviously copyrighted. But the problem was that Georgia had declared the annotations to be official.

The Supreme Court found this act of making them official made them essentially the law itself, and therefore uncopyrightable. Which meant LexisNexis had done all that expensive work for free, whoops.

So it's a weird edge case where Georgia should either not have accorded any special status to the annotations, or should have paid for annotations themselves if they wanted "official" ones, and made them public domain.

[matthewdgreen]

It’s not a weird edge case at all. For many specific areas like building codes, states have long delegated publication and “annotation” (essentially, writing down critical elements of the law that must be known to folks who want to obey the law) to private publishers. This isn’t literally “Georgia tried to copyright its laws” but it’s close enough to be morally the same. I remember being incensed about this in the late 1990s and I’m glad the wheel of justice (finally) turned.

ETA: A critical tell here are the words “The State of Georgia sued.” Georgia essentially tried to copyright its laws by having a private firm do the copyrighting, and they didn’t even make much effort to hide behind this fiction, since they were the plaintiff. Kudos to the courts for seeing past this low-effort obfuscation.

[Digory]

I’d guess Lexis did that to itself. Usually the “deal” is that West or Lexis provides codification and reporting services for zero dollars, if they are named the official printer.

So the Legislature doesn’t have to maintain and oversee their own nest of troublesome legal pedants, and picks up a few contributions from legal publishing “entrepreneurs.”

By making the Annotated code official, it meant that anyone looking to prove what a particular law says in court would have to get it from the expensive, $412 hardback book, not the free version. I’d guess Lexis asked for that provision as part of its deal with Georgia.