Opinion of the Court
in §101 may help explain why supplemental, explanatory materials are copyrightable when prepared by a private party, or a non-lawmaking official like the reporter in Callaghan, it does not speak to whether those same materials are copyrightable when prepared by a judge or a legislator. In the same way that judicial materials are ineligible for protection even though they plainly qualify as “[l]iterary works … expressed in words,” ibid., legislative materials are ineligible for protection even if they happen to fit the description of otherwise copyrightable “annotations.”
Second, Georgia draws a negative inference from the fact that the Act excludes from copyright protection “work[s] prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties” and does not establish a similar rule for the States. §101; see also §105. But the bar on copyright protection for federal works sweeps much more broadly than the government edicts doctrine does. That bar applies to works created by all federal “officer[s] or employee[s],” without regard for the nature of their position or scope of their authority. Whatever policy reasons might justify the Federal Government’s decision to forfeit copyright protection for its own proprietary works, that federal rule does not suggest an intent to displace the much narrower government edicts doctrine with respect to the States. That doctrine does not apply to non-lawmaking officials, leaving States free to assert copyright in the vast majority of expressive works they produce, such as those created by their universities, libraries, tourism offices, and so on.
More generally, Georgia suggests that we should resist applying our government edicts precedents to the OCGA annotations because our 19th-century forebears interpreted the statutory term author by reference to “public policy”—an approach that Georgia believes is incongruous with the “modern era” of statutory interpretation. Brief for Petitioners 21 (internal quotation marks omitted). But we
