Page:Veeck v Southern Building Code Congress Intl.pdf/42

 his at-best remotely tangential relationship to the codes and other laws of Anna and Savoy, his inability to present evidence that he was denied access to the towns' codes by the towns or SBCCI, the countervailing public policy concerns supporting copyright protection, and the direction and intent of recent congressional enactments and appellate case law, we should not have condoned Veeck's violation of SBCCI's copyright.

Reduced to its bare essentials, the majority's holding in favor of Veeck indisputably enacts the blanket, per se rule that once a copyrighted work is enacted into law by reference, it loses its entire copyright protection, ipso facto, regardless of the nature of the author, the character of the work, or the relationship of the copier to the work or to the governmental subdivision that enacted the work into law through incorporation by reference. Such an extremely broad and inflexible rule propels the majority's holding far beyond the ambit of Congress's enactments, the Supreme Court's pronouncements, and the opinions of other appellate courts that have addressed similar issues. Yet the possibility of obtaining such an all-encompassing ruling constituted Veeck's only hope of overcoming SBCCI's copyright protection vis-a-vis an otherwise admitted infringer who is too attenuated from anything that might otherwise excuse the unauthorized copying of these codes cum ordinances, such as a "need to know" for purposes of complying with one or more provisions of the codes. Veeck meets none of these criteria.