Page:Code Revision Commission v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. (F.3d).djvu/20

1248 force behind and ultimately adopts the OCGA annotations is significant. Like the Ohio Supreme Court in Banks, the Georgia General Assembly is not simply composed of ordinary government employees but rather of public officials whose official duties peculiarly include the direct exercise of sovereign power. See Ga. Const. Art. III, § I, Para. I (“The legislative power of the state shall be vested in a General Assembly which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.”). Of the many government workers employed by the state of Georgia, the creators of the OCGA annotations are unique insofar as they are entrusted by the sovereign with legislative power.

This is not to say that every work produced by a legislative body is automatically uncopyrightable. As we detail below, still more is necessary to demonstrate that the OCGA annotations are the kind of work that is attributable to the constructive authorship of the People. However, because the OCGA annotations were created by public officials entrusted with sovereign, legislative authority, just like the opinions in Banks were created by justices on the Ohio Supreme Court entrusted with sovereign, judicial authority, this weighs in favor of a determination that the OCGA annotations belong in the public domain.

We are also persuaded because, while not carrying the force of law in the way that the statutory portions of the OCGA do, the annotations are “law-like” in the sense that they are “authoritative” sources on the meaning of Georgia statutes. Having been merged by the General Assembly with the statutory text into a single, unified edict, stamped with the state’s imprimatur, and created and embraced by the same body that wrote the text that they explicate, the annotations have been suffused with powerful indicia of legal significance that is impossible to ignore. The annotations cast an undeniable, official shadow over how Georgia laws are interpreted and understood. Indeed, Georgia’s courts have cited to the annotations as authoritative sources on statutory meaning and legislative intent. The annotations’ authoritativeness makes them closely analogous to the types of works that ordinarily represent an exercise of sovereign authority. The nature of the work, like the identity of its creator, therefore impels us further toward the conclusion that these annotations are attributable to the constructive authorship of the People.

The nature of the OCGA annotations is spelled out in some detail by Georgia’s General Assembly. While disclaiming any legal effect in the annotations, the Georgia law providing for the creation of the OCGA also states that the “statutory portion of such codification shall be merged with annotations, captions, catchlines, history lines, editorial notes, cross-references, indices, title and chapter analyses, and