Code Swaraj
that they might provide the only official law of Georgia to the lawyers of Georgia. They were told that Fastcase would not be permitted to use the official laws of Georgia “at any price.”
We had lost our fight in the District Court. The Judge simply didn’t buy our argument. He had ruled that copies in courthouse libraries were sufficient. He honed in on the idea that if a private vendor had taken the laws and written their own judicial summaries, those summaries would in fact be subject to copyright. The judge issued an injunction prohibiting me from distributing the Official Code or having any mention of it on my site. I was gagged by a federal injunction from speaking the law.
We readily conceded the idea that privately-produced summaries of court cases could be subject to copyright. Our argument was that the Official Code of Georgia was not some unofficial private compilation, it was the definitive and official statement of the law, issued under the name and authority of the State of Georgia. Indeed, Section 1-1-1 of the Official Code states that people consulting unofficial compilations would do so “at their peril.”
We were now appearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Things had moved quickly on this case. We filed our notice of appeal on April 7, 2017 and our appellant’s brief went in May 17. After an appellant files a brief, outside parties wishing to support our position were given until May 24 to file their Friend of the Court (amicus curiae) brief.
Three briefs were filed on our behalf. First was a spectacular one from the civil liberties community, with the ACLU taking the lead and joined by groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Stanford Law School legal clinic filed another brief on behalf of a group of for-profit and non-profit innovative groups that were making great strides in making the law more accessible to ordinary people. Public Knowledge, a leading Washington, D.C. policy group filed a brief on behalf of a huge collection of law professors and librarians, as well as the library associations such as the American Library Association and the American Association of Law Libraries. It was quite a strong showing. I was pleased.
After we had submitted our filings, the State got to do the same. They filed their brief on June 30, 2017. Evidently, the State had no friends because there were no amicus briefs filed on their behalf.
The ACLU had filed a special motion with the court asking for permission to join with us in the oral argument. We had readily agreed! They were joining my
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