Oregon Attorney General is rethinking his copyright claim; I’d advise him to back off.

In Oregon, there’s an interesting and seemingly misbegotten effort by the state’s attorney general to assert the right to enforce a copyright in the state’s official documents. As the Oregonian reports, “Oregon Attorney General John Kroger met with a group of journalists in July and pledged to review the state’s public records act to make sure that it’s working properly. Kroger told the group the work would take some time but that it is “very important for me to get this right.” The review was provoked by a law professor who has posted to a web site a scanned copy of the Attorney General’s Public Records and Meetings Manual on his web site. “But the attorney general sells the 326-page book for $25 a pop, mostly to law firms and other state agencies. Kroger’s spokesman, Tony Green, says that’s how the AG’s office makes back the cost of producing the book.”

I suspect the Attorney General’s review will result in the state taking no action. According to L. Ray Patterson and Craig Joyce, in “Monopolizing the Law: the Scope of Copyright Protection for Law Reports and Statutory Compilations,” 36 UCLA L. Rev. 719, 723 (1989), the U.S. Supreme Court in 1834 held that “opinions of the Court are not copyrightable, and that holding remains the law. Subsequent cases and the present copyright act reinforce and expand upon the point: the law, whether in court opinions or statutes, cannot be reduced to property through copyright, whether by individuals or by the government itself.” (footnotes omitted)

ADDENDUM: William Patry writes in his treatise on copyright, Patry on Copyright, Secton 4:59, that

[J]judges, legislators, and by extension all government employees are paid by the public for performing their duties. Having paid the salaries, the public is deemed to own the fruits of the employees’ labors, a kind of work for hire. To grant copyright to employees for works created in the course of performing their duties would result in double payment. Moreover, having received their salaries, government employees do not need the additional incentive that copyright provides; the same logic applies at the institutional level. (footnotes omitted)