[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.