Opinion of the Court
See ibid.
The same goes for non-binding legislative materials produced by legislative bodies acting in a legislative capacity. There is a broad array of such works ranging from floor statements to proposed bills to committee reports. Under the logic of Georgia’s “force of law” test, States would own such materials and could charge the public for access to them.
Furthermore, despite Georgia’s and Justice Thomas’s purported concern for the text of the Copyright Act, their conception of the government edicts doctrine has less of a textual footing than the traditional formulation. The textual basis for the doctrine is the Act’s “authorship” requirement, which unsurprisingly focuses on—the author. Justice Thomas urges us to dig deeper to “the root” of our government edicts precedents. Post, at 5. But, in our view, the text is the root. The Court long ago interpreted the word “author” to exclude officials empowered to speak with the force of law, and Congress has carried that meaning forward in multiple iterations of the Copyright Act. This textual foundation explains why the doctrine distinguishes between some authors (who are empowered to speak with the force of law) and others (who are not). Compare Callaghan, 128 U. S., at 647, with Banks, 128 U. S., at 253. But the Act’s reference to “authorship” provides no basis for Georgia’s rule distinguishing between different categories of content with different effects.[1]
- ↑ Instead of accepting our predecessors’ textual reasoning at face value, Justice Thomas conjures a trinity of alternative “origin[s] and justification[s]” for the government edicts doctrine that the Court might have had in mind. See post, at 5–7. Without committing to one or all of these possibilities, Justice Thomas suggests that each would yield a rule that requires federal courts to pick out the subset of judicial and legislative materials that independently carry the force of law. But a Court motivated by Justice Thomas’s three-fold concerns might just as easily have read them as supporting a rule that prevents the officials responsible for
