State Says Annotated Official Code Is Copyrighted
The state of Georgia—which for seven years has fought to allow its university system to distribute authors' copyrighted works to students without paying royalties—is suing a California organization for publishing Georgia's annotated code of state laws online for free in what the state contends is copyright infringement.
July 28, 2015 at 01:30 PM
6 minute read
The state of Georgia—which for seven years has fought to allow its university system to distribute authors' copyrighted works to students without paying royalties—is suing a California organization for publishing Georgia's annotated code of state laws online for free in what the state contends is copyright infringement.
In a lawsuit filed July 21 in federal court in Atlanta, lawyers for the state's Code Revision Commission have asked U.S. District Judge Mark Cohen to bar a California public records activist and his organization, Public.Interest.org, from publishing the annotated Official Code of Georgia on various websites and distributing free digital copies without financially compensating the state. The Commission on Code Revision is composed of 15 members drawn from the Georgia General Assembly and the State Bar of Georgia, and includes a Superior Court judge and a district attorney.
In their complaint, attorneys for the state at Meunier Carlin & Curfman in Atlanta said publishing and publicly distributing copies of Georgia's state laws online is part of organization founder Carl Malamud's “strategy of terrorism” to force governments to publish public documents and make them freely available on what the state of Georgia contends are “Malamud's terms.” State lawyers also argued that Public.Interest.org's online publication of Georgia's entire compendium of current state laws, “the electronic nature of these documents, and their availability on the Internet, magnifies the ease and speed with which they may be copied and distributed to others.”
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