Oregon: All Your Laws Are Belong to Us
This has to be in the top five dumbest copyright threats I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot. Oregon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Justia.com threatening a copyright lawsuit for republishing Oregon law. The state concedes that the text of the law is not copyrighted, but claims that the numbering, arrangement, and annotations of the law are.
There is nothing preventing states from copyrighting works. But (and I can't believe it is even necessary to say this) the idea that democratically enacted laws could be the exclusive property of the state is both absurd and frightening. Courts and prosecutors will use numbering and annotations in applying the law, so the state's attempt to separate the plain statutory text from accompanying material is baseless. Besides, Justia did not publish the annotations.
