Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-1150_new_d18e.pdf
Page Number: 19.0

16 

GEORGIA v. PUBLIC.RESOURCE.ORG, INC. 

Opinion of the Court 

See ibid. 

The same goes for non-binding legislative materials pro-
duced 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 tex-
tual basis for the doctrine is the Act’s “authorship” require-
ment,  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 for-
ward in multiple iterations of the Copyright Act.  This tex-
tual foundation explains why the doctrine distinguishes be-
tween 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 Geor-
gia’s  rule  distinguishing  between  different  categories  of
content with different effects.4 

—————— 

4 Instead of accepting our predecessors’ textual reasoning at face value, 
JUSTICE THOMAS conjures a trinity of alternative “origin[s] and justifica-
tion[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 moti-
vated by JUSTICE THOMAS’s three-fold concerns might just as easily have 
read them as supporting a rule that prevents the officials responsible for