“After years of litigation, the state of Georgia has made its annotated legal code available for free online….
In a 2020 opinion captioned Georgia v. Public.Resource.org, the U.S. Supreme Court held that annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated are not subject to copyright protections….
Hundreds of law students, small firms, sole practitioners and legal educators urged the U.S. Supreme Court to eliminate copyright protection for state annotated codes of law and certain other state and local legal materials. The case was unusual because both parties and all of the friends of the court urged the justices to review it for different reasons.
Georgia focused on the “government edicts” doctrine, a judicially created exception to copyright protection for certain works that have the force of law. The annotated code contains summaries of judicial decisions and state attorney general opinions. The code without annotations was already free to the public.
The Supreme Court held that, under the “government edicts doctrine,” the annotations contained in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA) were not copyrightable….”