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The Official Code of Georgia Annotated or OCGA is the compendium of all laws in the U.S. state of Georgia. Like other U.S. state codes, its legal interpretation is subject to the United States Constitution, the United States Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, and the state's constitution. It is to the state what the United States Code (U.S.C.) is to the federal government.
A work of the United States government, as defined by the United States copyright law, is "a work prepared by an officer or employee" of the federal government "as part of that person's official duties." In general, under section 105 of the Copyright Act, such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law and are therefore in the public domain.
Official texts, as defined in Article 2(4) of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, are texts of a legislative, administrative and legal nature and the official translations of such texts.
Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. 591 (1834), was the first United States Supreme Court ruling on copyright. The case upheld the power of Congress to make a grant of copyright protection subject to conditions and rejected the doctrine of a common law copyright in published works. The Court also declared that there could be no copyright in the Court's own judicial decisions.
Carl Malamud is an American technologist, author, and public domain advocate, known for his foundation Public.Resource.Org. He founded the Internet Multicasting Service. During his time with this group, he was responsible for developing the first Internet radio station, for putting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database on-line, and for creating the Internet 1996 World Exposition.
The Code of Virginia is the statutory law of the U.S. state of Virginia, and consists of the codified legislation of the Virginia General Assembly. The 1950 Code of Virginia is the revision currently in force. The previous official versions were the Codes of 1819, 1849, 1887, and 1919, though other compilations had been printed privately as early as 1733, and other editions have been issued that were not designated full revisions of the code.
Crown copyright is a form of copyright claim used by the governments of a number of Commonwealth realms. It provides special copyright rules for the Crown, i.e. government departments and (generally) state entities. Each single Commonwealth realm has its own distinct Crown copyright regulations. There are therefore no common regulations that apply to all or a number of those countries. There are some considerations being made in Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand regarding the "reuse of Crown-copyrighted material, through new licences".
The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time limit, and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1926, are in the public domain.
Public.Resource.Org (PRO) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation dedicated to publishing and sharing public domain materials in the United States and internationally. It was founded by Carl Malamud and is based in Sebastopol, California.
Works are in the public domain if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all, or if the intellectual property rights to the works have expired.
Edict of government is a technical term associated with the United States Copyright Office's guidelines and practices that comprehensively includes laws, which advises that such submissions will neither be accepted nor processed for copyright registration. It is based on the principle of public policy that citizens must have unrestrained access to the laws that govern them. Similar provisions occur in most, but not all, systems of copyright law; the main exceptions are in those copyright laws which have developed from English law, under which the copyright in laws rests with the Crown or the government.
The copyright status of works produced by the governments of states, territories, and municipalities in the United States varies. Copyright law is federal in the United States. Federal law expressly denies U.S. copyright protection to two types of government works: works of the U.S. federal government itself, and all edicts of any government regardless of level or whether or not foreign. Other than addressing these "edicts of government", U.S. federal law does not address copyrights of U.S. state and local government.
The law of Illinois consists of several levels, including constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law, as well as case law and local law. The Illinois Compiled Statutes (ILCS) form the general statutory law.
The law of Georgia consists of several levels, including constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law, as well as case law and local law. The Official Code of Georgia Annotated forms the general statutory law.
The law of Michigan consists of several levels, including constitutional, statutory, regulatory and case law. The Michigan Compiled Laws form the general statutory law.
Veeck v. Southern Bldg. Code Congress Int'l, Inc., 293 F.3d 791, was a 2002 en banc 9-6 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, about the scope of copyright protection for building codes and by implication other privately drafted laws adopted by states and municipal governments. A three-fifths majority of the court's fifteen judges held that copyright protection no longer applied to model codes once they were enacted into law.
The Colorado Revised Statutes (C.R.S.) are a legal code of Colorado, the codified general and permanent statutes of the Colorado General Assembly.
The Indigo Book: An Open and Compatible Implementation of A Uniform System of Citation is a free content version of the Bluebook system of legal citation. Founded by New York University professor Christopher Jon Sprigman, authored collectively by Sprigman and a group of NYU law students, and published by Public.Resource.Org, it is an adaptation based on the 10th edition of the Bluebook as published by the Harvard Law Review Association in 1958, which had entered the public domain in the United States because its copyright had expired due to non-renewal.
Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., No. 18-1150, 590 U.S. ___ (2020), is a United States Supreme Court case regarding "whether the government edicts doctrine extends to—and thus renders uncopyrightable—works that lack the force of law, such as the annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated" (OCGA). On April 27, 2020, the Court ruled 5–4 that the OCGA cannot be copyrighted because the OCGA's annotations were "authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its legislative duties"; thus the Court found that the annotations fall under the government edicts doctrine and are ineligible for copyright.
Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd. was a 2014 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (755 F.3d 496.), in response to an appeal filed by the defendants against the 2013 ruling of the U.S. District Court for Northern district of Illinois (988 F. Supp. 2d 879). These decisions, by the district court and the court of the seventh circuit, clarified the validity of use of characters of Sherlock Holmes and his colleague Dr. John Watson, and the story elements, in unlicensed works. Further, the scope of using characters, existing in public domain, was also clarified.
References
- ↑ Armstrong, Tim. "Can States Copyright Their Statutes?". Info/Law. Archived from the original on 8 November 2015. Retrieved 12 November 2015.
- ↑ Bayard, Sam. "Oregon Claims Copyright in Its Statutes -- Well, Sort Of". Digital Media Law Project. Retrieved 12 November 2015.
- ↑ Kate Brumback, Court: Annotations to Georgia law not protected by copyright, Associated Press (October 22, 2018).
- ↑ "Oregon: Publishing our laws online is a copyright violation". 17 April 2008.