Page:Veeck v Southern Building Code Congress Intl.pdf/37

 WIENER, Circuit Judge, joined by KING, DENNIS, Chief Judge, and HIGGINBOTHAM,DAVIS, STEWART, Circuit Judges, dissenting:

Technical codes and standards have become necessary, pervasive, and indispensable ingredients of Twenty-First Century life in this country; regrettably, today's majority opinion has a real potential of drastically changing the societal landscape through that opinion's predictably deleterious effects on these codes and standards, their authors, and the public and private entities that daily use and depend on them. Despite efforts to clothe its ruling in classic copyright lingo—"public domain," "fact/expression," "merger" —in holding for Veeck under the discrete facts of this case, the majority had to (and did) adopt a per se rule that a single municipality's enactment of a copyrighted model code into law by reference strips the work of all copyright protection, ipso facto. Firmly believing that for this court to be the first federal appellate court to go that far is imprudent, I respectfully dissent.

As the underlying facts are undisputed, I adopt the majority opinion's detailed recitation of the facts, supplementing it with the following observations contained in the record. The technical codes here at issue are not mere compilations; rather they are original, "from scratch" creations by SBCCI which rightfully enjoy copyright protection from their inceptions. In each of its codes,