Legal Research

It?s all gone Ore-gon

By Mark Lewis

In a bit of a twist on recent practice, it seems that the state of Oregon is aggressively asserting copyright over statutes and legislation. In late April the legal resource website Justia, was served with a cease and desist order¹ by the Legislative Counsel of the State of Oregon pursuant to Justia posting Oregon laws. Interestingly, the state is not claiming copyright on the text itself but on such things as the “arrangement and subject matter compliation… the leadlines and numbering for each statutory section, the tables, index and annotations…”²

While this does seem rather Grinchy (numbering?) it leads to the question, what is the status of legislation and statutes in Canada? Without going into great detail (as there are others far more qualified than I to detail this topic); governments in Canada do retain copyright over legislation and statutes but allow the public to make use of these materials freely. Reproduction of Federal Law Order S.I. 97-115 states:

Anyone may, without charge or request for permission, reproduce enactments and consolidations of enactments of the Government of Canada, and decisions and reasons for decisions of federally-constituted courts and administrative tribunals, provided due diligence is exercised in ensuring the accuracy of the materials reproduced and the reproduction is not represented as an official version.

Interestingly, this order does not cover Provincial jurisdictions, but the provinces generally abide by the spirit of the above order. Generally speaking residents tend to view these materials as public property and jurisdictions that get in messy fights over these types of things risk being on the losing side of a public relations battle. That being said, the resolution of the dispute in Oregon has the possibility of being very interesting, especially for us types that are interested in technology and legal research.

1. As Blog-ed at Justia.com
2. From the order posted at Justia

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 16, 2008 (boomark / email).