Intellectual Property Law

Can States Copyright Their Statutes?

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

Via Boing Boing comes a story about the State of Oregon asserting copyright over its official codification of state laws, the Oregon Revised Statutes. The state’s Office of Legislative Counsel has been sending out C&Ds to groups like Justia and public.resource.org, demanding that they take down their copies of the state laws. The groups are responding with letters of their own arguing that the statutes are in the public domain as a matter of federal copyright law and that Oregon state law allows them to be freely reproduced. My analysis after the break.

Full post as published by Info/Law on April 16, 2008 (boomark / email).