opinions or statutes, ordinances or regulations, is not subject to federal copyright law.[1]
To sum up this section, we hold that when Veeck copied only "the law" of Anna and Savoy, Texas, which he obtained from SBCCI's publication, and when he reprinted only "the law" of those municipalities, he did not infringe SBCCI's copyrights in its model building codes. The basic proposition was stated by Justice Harlan, writing for the Sixth Circuit: "any person desiring to publish the statutes of a state may use any copy of such statutes to be found in any printed book . . ." Howell v. Miller, 91 F. 129, 137 (6th Cir. 1898).[2]See Jerry E. Smith, Government Documents: Their Copyright and Ownership, 22 Copyright Symposium 147, 174 (ASCAP 1977), reprinted in 5 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 71, 92 (1973).
II. The Copyright Act
A. The Merger Doctrine
As we earlier stated, SBCCI is the "author" of model building codes that, qua model building codes, are facially copyright-protected. This is true even if Banks places the building codes of Anna and Savoy, and other governmental entities
- ↑ What constitutes "the law" when a governmental entity adopts or incorporates by reference an author's copyrightable work will be considered infra, Part III.
- ↑ Our decision might well be the opposite, if Veeck had copied the model codes as model codes, or if he had indiscriminately mingled those portions of "the law" of Anna and Savoy adopted by their town councils with other parts of the model codes not so adopted.
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