Page:Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org SCOTUS slip opinion.pdf/2

Syllabus

public domain. The District Court sided with the Commission, holding that the annotations were eligible for copyright protection because they had not been enacted into law. The Eleventh Circuit reversed, rejecting the Commission’s copyright assertion under the government edicts doctrine.

Held: The OCGA annotations are ineligible for copyright protection. Pp. 5–18.

(a) The government edicts doctrine developed from a trio of 19th-century cases. In Wheaton v. Peters, 8 Pet. 591, the Court held that no reporter can have a copyright in the Court’s opinions and that the Justices cannot confer such a right on any reporter. In Banks v. Manchester, 128 U. S. 244, the Court held that judges could not assert copyright in “whatever work they perform in their capacity as judges”—be it “the opinion or decision, the statement of the case and the syllabus or the head note.” Id., at 253. Finally, in Callaghan v. Myers, 128 U. S. 617, the Court reiterated that an official reporter cannot hold a copyright interest in opinions created by judges. But, confronting an issue not addressed in Wheaton or Banks, the Court upheld the reporter’s copyright interest in several explanatory materials that the reporter had created himself because they came from an author who had no authority to speak with the force of law.

The animating principle behind the government edicts doctrine is that no one can own the law. The doctrine gives effect to that principle in the copyright context through construction of the statutory term “author.” For purposes of the Copyright Act, judges cannot be the “author[s]” of “whatever work they perform in their capacity” as lawmakers. Banks, 128 U. S., at 253. Because legislators, like judges, have the authority to make law, it follows that they, too, cannot be “authors.” And, as with judges, the doctrine applies to whatever work legislators perform in their capacity as legislators, including explanatory and procedural materials they create in the discharge of their legislative duties. Pp. 5–9.

(b) Applying that framework, Georgia’s annotations are not copyrightable. First, the author of the annotations qualifies as a legislator. Under the Copyright Act, the sole “author” of the annotations is the Commission, 17 U. S. C. §201(b), which functions as an arm of the Georgia Legislature in producing the annotations. Second, the Commission creates the annotations in the discharge of its legislative duties. Pp. 9–11.

(c) Georgia argues that excluding the OCGA annotations from copyright protection conflicts with the text of the Copyright Act. First, it notes that §101 lists “annotations” among the kinds of works eligible for copyright protection. That provision, however, refers only to “annotations … which … represent an original work of authorship.”