Georgia Ruling: End of the Public-Private Partnership?

In his dissent to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Georgia v Public.Resource.Org decision in April, Justice Clarence Thomas cautioned that invalidating Georgia’s copyright in state code annotations will seriously “shock” the public-private legal publishing system used by about half of the states. The central question of the case was whether the state of Georgia owns a copyright in the annotations of the Official Code of Georgia. To gain access to the annotations, researchers had to subscribe to a private legal publishing service licensed by the state of Georgia. Open Access advocacy group Public.Resource.org posted unauthorised copies of the annotations arguing that they were non-copyrightable law. Georgia sued Public.Resource.org for copyright infringement and the case found itself before the Supreme Court.

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