I Am Not a Lawyer

This time, I have a good excuse for my silence: I just spent a week in the Bay Area. Not that they lack for internet access up there, but travel is a bit disruptive. However, while I was there, I had the good fortune to meet with Justia, a quasi-client (I don’t exactly work for them so much as we work together), and they mentioned to me that they may soon be embroiled in an interesting copyright dispute. In short, Justia is gathering the laws of every U.S. state and federal laws into one convenient site. (They’re also doing court filings and such. As a legal writer, I can’t overstate how much I love this.) The State of Oregon has taken exception. They sent Justia a cease-and-desist letter this month, claiming Justia is violating their copyright to the Oregon Revised Statutes.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Oregon isn’t claiming copyright in the laws themselves. Indeed, according to what appears to be well-established law, they can’t. Instead, they’re claiming copyright in “the arrangement and subject matter of Oregon statutory law, the prefatory and explanatory notes, the leadlines and numbering for each statutory section, the tables, index and annotations and such other incidents as are the work product of the [Oregon Legislative Council] Committee in the compilation and publication of Oregon law.”

Ahem. Distilled, this seems to mean the State of Oregon claims copyright on the organization of the information and the supporting information, rather than the information itself. However, as various legal minds around the blogosphere have pointed out, you can’t really separate the information from the organization and have anything useful left. Plus the blogger I linked to above, Prof. Tim Armstrong of the University of Cincinnati College of Law, points out that the organization of the info may not rise to the level of originality necessary for claiming a copyright.

As you may have heard, I’m not a lawyer, but I’m having a hard time seeing how this isn’t just an end run around settled law. More educated people are more than welcome to explain why I’m wrong. I am not being sarcastic; I truly feel my lack of a JD here. More importantly, the whole business of copyrighting public information is pretty clearly anti-democratic and seems like a cynical attempt to make some money (is the Oregon budget situation that bad?). It doesn’t look to me like it’s guaranteed to wind up in court, and pretty much everyone seems to hope it won’t, but I’ll be watching.

News articles on the subject from Ars Technica and The Washington Times (?!). Blog posts, in addition to Justia’s own and the one from Prof. Armstrong, are at The Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project, The Patry Copyright Blog (from Google senior copyright counsel Bill Patry), and a more sympathetic view from The Oregon Legal Research Blog.