Democracy in the Dark: Public Access Restrictions from Westlaw and LexisNexis
Democracy in the Dark: Public Access Restrictions from Westlaw and LexisNexis
“Mr. Veeck purchased an electronic (CD-ROM) copy of local building codes and copied them onto his free Web site for anyone to use. When the author and purported copyright holder of the codes, Southern Building Code Congress Inc., ordered Mr. Veeck to remove the codes, he sued them, claiming the codes were in the public domain because they had been adopted in full by the local communities as official building codes. Mr. Veeck lost at the district and circuit court levels but appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for a hearing en banc a hearing by all of the judges on the court, rather than the smaller panel of judges that had ruled against him. On June 7, 2002, in an 8 to 6 split, the Court ruled in Mr. Veeck’s favor. In the court opinion, Judge Edith Jones quoted from a 115-year-old decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Banks v. Manchester14, that exempted court opinions from copyright law as a matter of public policy. FindLaw’s free database of Supreme Court opinions only goes back to 1896, but fortunately Mr. Veeck had posted a copy of the case
on his Web site.”
