States Licensing their Statutes?
According to a recent post by Tim Stanley, the founder of Justia - the terrific site for, among other things, free legal reference materials - the State of Oregon is demanding that Justia pay a licensing fee to display the Oregon Code.
As someone who grew up in Oregon, I have to say I’m a bit embarrassed for my home state. First and foremost, shouldn’t a state want its statutes disseminated as broadly as possible? After all, it’s hard to comply with the law if you don’t know what it says.
Secondly, Oregon’s position is flatly contrary to very well-established copyright law. Cases going waaaay back have found that public laws are not copyrightable; at best, publishers (such as the State of Oregon) can protect the “creatively original” portions of the “selection and arrangement” of their publications of the codes. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that no court is going to find that the numbering or structure of the Oregon code is copyrightable by the state.
Kudos to Justia for continuing to fight to make this kind of information more readily accessible to the public.