Note on Code Swaraj
the sate. It was the law of the land. This was, in my considered opinion, an edict of government.
The State’s position was that they used a vendor to prepare the Official Code of Georgia Annotated and while they conceded that the law itself perhaps had no copyright, they believed they had the right to claim ownership in the name of the State over the annotations.
There are several kinds of annotations in the Official Code, but the one the State focused in on was summaries of court cases relevant to the law. These were prepared by their vendor and the State felt that without giving the vendor an exclusive right to sell the code for several hundred dollars, there would be no incentive to produce the Official Code and this would somehow cost the taxpayers untold millions. Their position was that by giving a monopoly concession to a private party, they were somehow getting a good deal for the taxpayers.
While this explanation perhaps resonated in the halls of the Georgia Statehouse, I can tell you from experience that nobody I spoke to in a taxicab or a bar or when speaking to students understood the State’s position. You can’t slice and dice the only code of the state into pieces that you can speak and pieces that you can’t speak.
The state tried hard to push the theory that the code was in fact available because they had a copy in a few law libraries at county courthouses. NBC News did an investigative report and went looking for those copies in the courthouse libraries and they found that in most cases the codes were locked in a back room, or volumes were missing or damaged. NBC won an Emmy Award for that report.
Mind you, I wasn’t the only one who was not able to use the Official Code of Georgia without permission. One of our declarations filed in the District Court was from the legal provider Fastcase. Ed Walters, the CEO and co-founder of Fastcase, has been a long-time member of my board of directors. Fastcase provides access to case law and statutes for all 50 states. One of the primary ways it does this is by cutting deals with state bar associations.
For the State Bar of Georgia, the organization representing all lawyers in the state, Fastcase had been named the official provider of law. All lawyers were given free access to Fastcase as part of their membership in the bar. Fastcase approached the state and their vendor and asked to license the Official Code so
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