Fastcase - Lawriter lawsuit: can public law be owned by private publishers?

Who owns the rights to laws, statutes, and other related content once they are published online?  Does the legal publishing company that have exclusive rights?  But should not the laws be made free to the people they serve?  How can they be subject to copyright law?

Those are the sticky issues that will be discussed and hopefully resolved once the dust settles in the ongoing legal fight between legal research firm Fastcase Inc. and online legal publisher Lawriter LLC. Ars Technica gives the background of the case. Lawriter holds the rights to publish online the George Administrative Rules and Regulations. It served a cease-and-desist motion to Fastcase for offering these online files to its own customers without paying for a subscription. Lawriter maintains that its copyright over the Georgia rules are exclusive as part of its partnership with the state.

Fastcase's response was quick. It said that Lawriter "cannot claim a valid copyright or an exclusive license to a valid copyright. It is well established in American law that state laws, including administrative rules and regulations, are not copyrightable, and must remain public as a matter of due process." 

The Daily Report Online reports that Fastcase then filed a lawsuit against Lawriter, questioning its suppose claim of copyright over the Georgia rules.

It also gives more details about the partnership between Georgia and Lawriter. Secretary of State Brian Kemp's office does maintain that Lawriter is the designated online publisher of their laws, giving it the right to sell copies of the material, whether as a whole or by chapters. It also clearly states that Lawriter has exclusive rights over the distribution of the material.

However, the office's website goes into murky ground when it says that the online publishing of the law material was intended to make them available to users free of charge.  Readers are not required to register or use code names and passwords to access the material.

Other cases, however, may indicate where Georgia's ultimate position lies, according to a report by Bloomberg BNA. It sued publisher PublicResource.org over copyright infringement for publishing an annotation of its laws.

Tags

Fastcase, online legal publishing, copyright, Georgia Administrative Rules and Regulations

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