Page:Veeck v Southern Building Code Congress Intl.pdf/28

 to the Red Book or to specific school books, the law requires citizens to consult or use a copyrighted work in the process of fulfilling their obligations. The copyrighted works do not "become law" merely because a statute refers to them. See 1 § 2.49 at n. 45.2 ( noting that CCC and Practice Management "involved compilations of data that had received governmental approval, not content that had been enacted into positive law"). Equally important, the referenced works or standards in CCC and Practice Management were created by private groups for reasons other than incorporation into law. To the extent incentives are relevant to the existence of copyright protection, the authors in these cases deserve incentives. And neither CCC nor AMA solicited incorporation of their standards by legislators or regulators. In the case of a model code, on the other hand, the text of the model serves no other purpose than to become law. SBCCI operates with the sole motive and purpose of creating codes that will become obligatory in law.

At first glance, Practice Management appears to pose a closer issue because the HCFA did not simply refer physicians to the AMA's coding system. The court's opinion directs the reader to HHS's notice in the Federal Register announcing that HCFA would require physicians to

use exclusively a common procedure coding system. The system is the HCFA common procedure coding system (HCPCS). This coding system is to be used for coding procedures that have been performed. . . and is