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GEORGIA v. PUBLIC.RESOURCE.ORG, INC. 

Syllabus 

public domain.  The District Court sided with the Commission, holding
that  the  annotations  were  eligible  for  copyright  protection  because 
they had not been enacted into law.  The Eleventh Circuit reversed, 
rejecting the Commission’s copyright assertion under the government
edicts doctrine. 

Held: The  OCGA  annotations  are  ineligible  for  copyright  protection.

Pp. 5–18.

(a) The  government  edicts  doctrine  developed  from  a  trio  of  19th-
century cases.  In Wheaton v. Peters, 8 Pet. 591, the Court held that no 
reporter can have a copyright in the Court’s opinions and that the Jus-
tices cannot confer such a right on any reporter.  In Banks v. Manches-
ter, 128 U. S. 244, the Court held that judges could not assert copyright 
in “whatever work they perform in their capacity as judges”—be it “the
opinion or decision, the statement of the case and the syllabus or the 
head note.”  Id., at 253.  Finally, in Callaghan v. Myers, 128 U. S. 617, 
the Court reiterated that an official reporter cannot hold a copyright 
interest in opinions created by judges.  But, confronting an issue not 
addressed in Wheaton or Banks, the Court upheld the reporter’s copy-
right interest in several explanatory materials that the reporter had 
created himself because they came from an author who had no author-
ity to speak with the force of law. 

The  animating  principle  behind  the  government  edicts  doctrine  is 
that no one can own the law.  The doctrine gives effect to that principle 
in  the  copyright  context  through  construction  of  the  statutory  term 
“author.”  For purposes of the Copyright Act, judges cannot be the “au-
thor[s]” of “whatever work they perform in their capacity” as lawmak-
ers.  Banks, 128 U. S., at 253.  Because legislators, like judges, have
the  authority  to  make  law,  it  follows  that  they,  too,  cannot  be  “au-
thors.”    And,  as  with  judges,  the  doctrine  applies  to  whatever  work 
legislators perform in their capacity as legislators, including explana-
tory and procedural materials they create in the discharge of their leg-
islative duties.  Pp. 5–9.

(b) Applying  that  framework,  Georgia’s  annotations  are  not  copy-
rightable.  First, the author of the annotations qualifies as a legislator. 
Under the Copyright Act, the sole “author” of the annotations is the
Commission,  17  U. S. C.  §201(b),  which  functions  as  an  arm  of  the 
Georgia Legislature in producing the annotations.  Second, the Com-
mission creates the annotations in the discharge of its legislative du-
ties.  Pp. 9–11.

(c) Georgia argues that excluding the OCGA annotations from copy-
right protection conflicts with the text of the Copyright Act.  First, it 
notes that §101 lists “annotations” among the kinds of works eligible
for copyright protection.  That provision, however, refers only to “an-
notations  . . .  which  . . .  represent  an  original  work  of  authorship.”