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Page Number: 42

4 

GEORGIA v. PUBLIC.RESOURCE.ORG, INC. 

GINSBURG, J., dissenting 

determining whether existing law should be amended. 

The requirement that the statutory portions of the OCGA
“shall be merged with annotations,” §1–1–1, does not ren-
der the annotations anything other than explanatory, ref-
erential,  or  commentarial  material.    See  Harrison  Co.  v. 
Code Revision Comm’n, 244 Ga. 325, 331, 260 S. E. 2d 30, 
35  (1979)  (observation  by  the  Supreme  Court  of  Georgia 
that “inclusion of annotations in [the] ‘official Code’ ” does 
not  “give  the  annotations  any  official  weight”).3   Annota-
tions  aid  the  legal  researcher,  and  that  aid  is  enhanced
when annotations are printed beneath or alongside the rel-
evant statutory text.  But the placement of annotations in 
the  OCGA  does  not  alter  their  auxiliary,  nonlegislative 
character. 

* 

* 

* 
Because summarizing judicial decisions and commentary
bearing  on  enacted  statutes,  in  contrast  to,  for  example, 
drafting a committee report to accompany proposed legisla-
tion,  is  not  done  in  a  legislator’s  law-shaping  capacity,  I
would hold the OCGA annotations copyrightable and there-
fore  reverse  the  judgment  of  the Court  of  Appeals  for  the 
Eleventh Circuit. 

—————— 

3 That the Georgia Supreme Court described the Commission’s work as 
“within the sphere of legislative authority” for state separation-of-powers 
purposes, Harrison Co. v. Code Revision Comm’n, 244 Ga. 325, 330, 260 
S. E. 2d 30, 34 (1979), does not resolve the federal Copyright Act question
before us.  Cf. Yates v. United States, 574 U. S. 528, 537 (2015) (plurality 
opinion) (“In law as in life, . . . the same words, placed in different con-
texts, sometimes mean different things.”); Cook, “Substance” and “Pro-
cedure” in the Conflict of Laws, 42 Yale L. J. 333, 337 (1933) (“The ten-
dency to assume that a word which appears in two or more legal rules,
and so in connection with more than one purpose, has and should have
precisely  the  same  scope  in  all  of  them,  runs  all  through  legal  discus-
sions.    It  has  all  the  tenacity  of  original  sin  and  must  constantly  be 
guarded against.”).