AMA's coding system for identifying physicians' services on Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement forms. AMA granted a "non-exclusive, royalty-free and irrevocable" license to HCFA, without restrictions on the government's ability to reproduce or distribute AMA's codes. There was no evidence that AMA had restricted the code's availability to anyone. The Ninth Circuit held that the HCFA's decision to adopt regulations requiring physicians to use a version of the AMA code on Medicaid claim forms did not place the code in the public domain under Banks. Practice Management, 121 F.3d at 519 ("[T]he AMA's right under the Copyright Act to limit or forgo publication of the [coding system] poses no realistic threat to public access.").
Both the Second and Ninth Circuits feared that reaching the opposite conclusion in those cases would have "expose[d] copyrights on a wide range of privately authored model codes, standards, and reference works to invalidation." Practice Management, 121 F.3d at 519. federal court rules regarding The Ninth Circuit suggested that citations could invalidate the copyrightability of the Blue Book. Id. at n.5. The Second Circuit feared that a ruling in favor of CCC Information Systems would call into question the copyrightability of school books once they were assigned as part of a mandatory school curriculum. CCC Info Services, 44 F.3d at 74.
These decisions, and the hypothetical situations they discuss, are all distinguishable from Veeck. If a statute refers
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