Re: Copyright in California Regulations

In Minnesota, the Council listed below developed guidelines regarding copyright restrictions on state of Minnesota (and secondary) government materials. Those guidelines became statutory language subsequently. I served as Chair of the Working Group on Intellectual Property and public access to government information.

In general, the assumption is that all government material is not to be copyrighted unless it falls into certain specific categories listed in the report. For our team, the two most difficult questions were:

1. how to restrict original software developed by the government while providing access to the integrated data of any report and
2. the political problem of allowing access to information that state agencies produced and desired to sell rather than give away.

In Minnesota, the language in the statutes is not copyrightable. However, the Office of the State Revisor maintains a copyright on the statutes as published in the official Register; specifically, copyright is asserted in the historical notes, the editorial notes, the format and captions. A similar copyright is asserted on the Web pages for the Minnesota Statutes on the Net.

As you can see, the areas over which copyright is asserted as similar to the areas that West Publishing asserts over its material and asserted using similar reasoning. However, my udnerstanding is that staff at West Publishing do not agree with the practice of state governments asserting copyright in their materials.

Minnesota Department of Administration
Government Information Access Council
320 Centennial Office Building
658 Cedar Street
St. Paul, MN 55155
612-296-6451
giac[_at_]state.mn.us
http://www.state.mn.us/ebranch/admin/ipo/giac/

Linda Hopkins, J.D.
<lkhopkins[_at_]intelliwareint.com> Received on Fri Feb 19 1999 - 17:23:39 GMT