Cite as 244 F.Supp.3d 1350 (N.D.Ga. 2017)
Revision Commission and the Michie Company pursuant to a contract entered into on June 19, 1978, is enacted and shall have the effect of statutes enacted by the General Assembly of Georgia. The statutory portion of such codification shall be merged with annotations, captions, catchlines, history lines, editorial notes, cross-references, indices, title and chapter analyses, and other materials pursuant to the contract and shall be published by authority of the state pursuant to such contract and when so published shall be known and may be cited as the “Official Code of Georgia Annotated.”
O.C.G.A. § 1-1-7 first enacted as a session law in 1982 further states:
Unless otherwise provided in this Code, the descriptive headings or catchlines immediately preceding or within the text of the individual Code sections of this Code, except the Code section numbers included in the headings or catchlines immediately preceding the text of the Code sections, and title and chapter analyses do not constitute part of the law and shall in no manner limit or expand the construction of any Code section. All historical citations, title and chapter analyses, and notes set out in this Code are given for the purpose of convenient reference and do not constitute part of the law.
Finally, the State of Georgia sessions laws include the following:
Annotations; editorial notes; Code Revision Commission notes; research references; notes on law review articles; opinions of the Attorney General of Georgia; indexes; analyses; title, chapter, article, part, and subpart captions or headings, except as otherwise provided in the Code; catchlines of the Code sections or portions thereof, except as otherwise provided in the Code; and rules and regulations of state agencies, departments, boards, commissions, or other entities which are contained in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated are not enacted as statutes by the provisions of this Act.
2014 Ga. Laws 866, 2015 Ga. Laws 5, § 54.
Finally, Defendant has argued that the merger doctrine applies here and bars copyrightability. Under the merger doctrine, “expression is not protected in those instances where there is only one or so few ways of expressing an idea that protection of the expression would effectively accord protection to the idea itself.” BUC Int’l Corp. v. Int’l Yacht Council Ltd., 489 F.3d 1129, 1142 (11th Cir. 2007) (internal quotation marks omitted). Such is not the case here. The mere fact that the judicial summaries in the O.C.G.A. are distinctly different from corresponding annotations in West’s Code Annotated belies the applicability of the merger doctrine. There is no question that there are a multitude of ways to write a paragraph summarizing a judicial decision, and further, a multitude of ways to compile the different annotations throughout the O.C.G.A. Therefore, the Court finds that the merger doctrine is inapplicable here.
For the reasons discussed above, the Court finds that the annotations of the O.C.G.A. are copyrightable.
- B. Fair Use
Since the Court has found that the annotations of the O.C.G.A. are entitled to copyright protection, the Court will now address Defendant’s arguments regarding fair use. A claim of fair use is an affirmative defense with the burden of
