Supreme Court says state laws aren’t copyrightable.

"When Harvard decided to digitize its entire collection of U.S. case law in 2013, it couldn’t just scan the 40 million pages it had amassed in its Law School library and put them up online—it had to undertake an expensive and time-consuming process of redacting notes, annotations, and anything else surrounding the actual case law that might not be in the public domain and could therefore trigger a copyright lawsuit.

That same year, Carl Malamud, the founder of nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org, decided to do something similar with Georgia state laws. However, he took a different route. He purchased a hard copy of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated for more than $1,200 from LexisNexis, scanned it, and sent USB drives with two copies of the entire state code to several Georgia legislators. He also posted it online, prompting the state of Georgia to sue him for copyright infringement in a lawsuit that memorably accused Malamud of “terrorism,” stating, “Consistent with its strategy of terrorism, Defendant freely admits to the copying and distribution of massive numbers of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Annotations on at least its https://yeswescan.org website.” 

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Malamud, saying that Georgia state laws and their official annotations, like all other works authored by judges or legislators, are not copyrightable. The decision came down to a 5–4 split between the court’s youngest five justices (John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh) and its four oldest members (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg)...."