Page:The librarian's copyright companion, by James S. Heller, Paul Hellyer, Benjamin J. Keele, 2012.djvu/28

12 Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that West Publishing Company’s arrangements of judicial decisions in its reporters were original works of authorship entitled to copyright protection. But a decade later, the Second Circuit came to the opposite conclusion when it held that West Publishing could not claim copyright in the arrangement of its reporters because it lacked the creativity necessary for copyright protection.

It seems clear that court records—the oral or written transcript of the trial proceedings—are in the public domain. It appears that briefs submitted by attorneys to federal or state courts also may be freely copied; while no case has squarely decided the issue, at least two courts have indicated that court briefs enter the public domain when they become part of the judicial record. In fact, briefs are commonly copied into microformat, and are digitized and made freely available on many websites.

Statutes and ordinances that emanate from state or local governments are not copyrightable. It is unclear, however, whether a privately published, subject-arranged compilation of state statutes or local ordinances—in other words, a “code”—is in the public domain. Furthermore, it remains an open question whether statutes or administrative codes prepared by private entities (such as a building code) that are subsequently adopted by a state or local government enter the public domain when they are adopted into law.

You may copy sections from a federal, state, or local code. It does not matter if you are a student, a teacher, or an attorney who charges $300 an hour. You also may copy sections from a privately prepared federal, state,