works that derive from the legitimate exercise of sovereign power, such as official interpretations of the law and the law itself, are assigned authoritative weight.
Put another way, whether or not a work is assigned the authoritative weight associated with law is deeply intertwined with the question of whether the work was made by the agents of the People in the legitimate exercise of delegated, sovereign power. As Hamilton explained during the ratification debates, “[n]o legislative act [ ] contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.” The Federalist No. 78 at 466 (Alexander Hamilton) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961). As a result, the authoritativeness of a work is probative on the question of whether a work is created in an exercise of sovereign power, and is also probative on the question of whether a work falls within the scope of the rule in Banks. Thus, in addition to whether the work was prepared by a judicial or legislative body, an examination of the nature of the work, which is another way of asking whether it carries authoritative weight, may indicate whether the work is uncopyrightable.
These annotations carry authoritative weight and therefore make it more likely that the work is attributable to the constructive authorship of the People. Quite simply, they are much closer to resembling the judicially authored materials found in Banks than other works produced by state employees, such as the materials produced by the Court reporter in Callaghan.
C.
The final factor we consider is the process by which the annotations were created. While the process by which the annotations were made into an official edict of the State of Georgia is not identical to the process by which the statutory provisions were made into binding law, they are very closely related. As a result, like the identity of the work’s creator and the nature of the work, the process also weighs in favor of the conclusion that the work is uncopyrightable.
Both parties acknowledge that the Georgia General Assembly does not individually enact each separate annotation as part of the ordinary legislative process. In this respect the annotations are different than the statutory portions of the OCGA. The statutory portions of the Code are introduced as bills in the Georgia legislature, generally pass through the committee process where legislators can directly influence the text of the bill, are voted on by both Houses, and are signed by the Governor. See Tracking a Bill Through the General Assembly, http://www.legis.ga.gov/Legislation/en-US/default.aspx.
The enacted laws of a session of the legislature are then “published in Georgia Laws as a collection of session laws, representing all of the acts and resolutions passed during that particular legislative session.” Austin Williams, “Researching Georgia Law,” 34 Ga. St. U.L. Rev. 741, 761 (2015). Later, the laws are incorporated into the OCGA. Id. Each year, the Georgia legislature then votes to “reenact the statutory portion of [the] Code as amended, in furtherance of the work of the Code Revision Commission,” thereby voting on the statutory text in the form in which it has been incorporated into the OCGA. See, e.g., 2017 Ga. Laws 275, § 54; 2016 Ga. Laws 625, § 54; 2015 Ga. Laws 9, § 54.
Further, under Georgia law, it is the responsibility of the Code Revision Commission to “prepare and have introduced at
