Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., No. 18-1150, 590 U.S. ___ (2020), is a United States Supreme Court case regarding "whether the government edicts doctrine extends to—and thus renders uncopyrightable—works that lack the force of law, such as the annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated" (OCGA). On April 27, 2020, the Court ruled 5–4 that the OCGA cannot be copyrighted because the OCGA's annotations were "authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its legislative duties"; thus the Court found that the annotations fall under the government edicts doctrine and are ineligible for copyright. Litigation began in 2013 after Carl Malamud published the OCGA on Public.Resource.Org (PRO). The state of Georgia filed a lawsuit in 2015. In March 2017, a federal court in the Northern District of Georgia ruled in the state's favor, after which in 2018 the Eleventh Circuit reversed the ruling. Both Georgia and PRO appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in December 2019. Background Government edicts In the United States, laws, statutes, and court decisions, all as edicts of government, are considered to be in the public domain, available to the public for free and not protected by copyright. This doctrine is rooted in the Copyright Act's 'authorship' requirement and posits that officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of the works they create in the course of their official duties. Based on the principle, the law must be free for publication to all. Context The Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA) is assembled by a state entity called the Code Revision Commission (the Commission) and is the official law of Georgia. The OCGA contains both the official statutes as well as annotations. The annotations explain and expound upon the statutes and contain "summaries of state attorney general's opinions, advisory opinions by the State Bar of Georgia, summaries of important court rulings, excerpts of law review articles, legislative histories[,] and repeals". The Commission entered into a work-for-hire agreement with Matthew Bender & Co., Inc., a division of the LexisNexis Group, to prepare annotations.The Georgia government asserted that it held copyright to the OCGA; further, Georgia's legislature exempted itself from the state's open records law. While the state claimed that the OCGA is easily accessible via libraries, journalists for Atlanta news channel 11Alive were "unable to find a complete set of current law books at three branches