New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

On the Authorship of Law II: The Social Life of Building Codes

By Gordon Hull

As I noted last time, the Supreme Court has decided to take up a case about copyright in state codes.  Specifically, Georgia contracts with Lexis to produce an annotated version of its code, which is the state then blesses with the title “Official Georgia Code Annotated” and claims copyright in.  The question is whether the annotations are part of the code; if they are, they are public domain because the law is public domain.  The 11^th Circuit said that they are, because the legislature officially adopts them, courts refer to them, etc.  If it walks like a duck…

One of the decisions cited in the 11^th Circuit opinion cites along the way establishes that model building codes, once incorporated into statute, lose whatever copyright protection they had.  In Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress International (293 F.3d 791 (5th Cir. 2002)), SBCCI was “a non-profit organization consisting of approximately 14,500 members from government bodies, the construction industry, business and trade associations, students, and colleges and universities.”  SBCCI’s purpose was to develop model building codes for municipal governments to adopt, which the small north Texas towns of Anna and Savoy did.  Veeck ran a web site about northern Texas, and wanted to put the building codes online.  When he had some difficulty getting them from Anna and Savoy, he paid SBCCI $72 for the codes, and then posted that online, correctly labeling them as the building codes of Anna and Savoy.  The question, then, was whether in being enacted as part of the municipal law of Anna and Savoy, the codes lost the copyright protection they enjoyed as products of SBCCI.  The 5^th Circuit, relying on the premises that “law” is not copyrightable, the copyright idea/expression dichotomy, and extant caselaw, ruled that the codes were no longer copyrightable.

If the Georgia case attempted to think through what the conceptual underpinnings of the thesis that law is not copyrightable, SBCCI offers a chance to think about what that means in practice, and how it interacts with the more commercial IP system.  Indeed, one of SBCCI’s arguments in favor of protection was quite precisely the commercial incentives justification for copyright.  I want to approach all this somewhat elliptically.  Quite some time ago, I used Deleuze’s critique of Platonism (in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense) to suggest that the original/copy distinction in copyright functions like the eidos/copy distinction in Platonism.  For Deleuze this distinction isn’t about metaphysics so much as police work: it’s about knowing how to distinguish legitimate copies from illegitimate simulacra.  Deleuze writes:

On the Authorship of Law: Copyright, Foucault, and Hobbes

There is an interesting copyright case before the Supreme Court this term, Georgia v. Public Resource.org. It is settled law that official edicts of the government – statutory texts, judicial opinions, agency rules – are not copyrightable. More about that in a moment. In this case, Georgia entered into a contract with Lexis to produce an annotated version of its code. The state gets editorial control, and Lexis gets exclusive publication rights. The product is the “Official Georgia Code Annotated” and is generally cited as the authoritative statement of Georgia law. Public Resource made copies of the OGCA publicly available for free, including the annotations. The state claims copyright over the annotations and sued to enjoin Public Resource.  The question before the court is thus whether the annotations to state law are copyrightable, even given that the statutory text is not.

The case follows an appeal from a substantial Eleventh Circuit opinion, finding that the OGCA was not copyrightable because, even if it wasn’t quite the same thing as the statutory text, it nonetheless is “an exercise of sovereign power” (3) and “sufficiently law-like so as to be properly regarded as a sovereign work” (4). There’s a lot to say, and much depends on the peculiar arrangement Georgia has with Lexis.  For example, the OGCA both costs money and is taken to be authoritative over the unannotated version of the text made available for free; it is both the results of a heavily regulated legislative process and is routinely cited by Courts as authoritative in interpreting the law. What I want to focus on here, however, is the 11^th Circuit’s discussion of authorship.