In Who Owns the Law? in the New York Times, Noam Cohen investigates why, though US laws and judicial opinions are public domain, a variety of organisations — from trade groups and legal publishers to the government itself — claim copyright in it by virtue of the “accoutrements” surrounding the public material. “So while the laws and court decisions themselves may be in the public domain, the same is not necessarily true for the organizational system that renders them intelligible or the supporting materials that put them into context.”
The position is similar here. Legislation and judgments are Crown copyright, though OPSI licences their use on a generous open basis via its Click-Use licence. But if a private publisher or the government itself adds some value, whether just presentational, that added value is the copyright of the secondary publisher.
We had that argument over the Statute Law Database where the government’s position was initially that its consolidation and annotation of the legislation was a value-added service. In the end – hurrah – it was nevertheless declared “open”. But don’t expect LexisNexis or Thomson or ICLR or TSO, or even BAILII, to follow suit with respect to their added value.
If the government publish the information in the most open way possible, no-one will have a stranglehold over the law. The government now embraces this argument … and here we are to make the most of it.
