 |
| Knightly studies copyright law |
I’ve
long complained that eleven sitting Wisconsin judges write our criminal jury instructions (JIs) and then somehow
take and transfer a copyright in those JIs to the University of Wisconsin (UW),
which then turns around and sells them back to us after we’ve already paid the judges’ salaries! Worse yet, we
lawyers have to pay annual update fees or the instructions quickly go out of
date. As I wrote in a recent blog post,
I don’t think this is legal:
The
“government edicts doctrine” states that court decisions and even “non-binding,
explanatory legal materials are not copyrightable when created by judges who possess the authority to
make and interpret the law.” (Georgia v. Public Resource, P. 4.)
Now,
the UW-JI Committee gravy train could be coming to an end. A non-profit California
