copying case laws for school law class

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• November 27, 2010 @ 5:55pmkyjohnson says:

  I recently received this from a co-worker after reminding all staff to be good role models for students and research copyrights before copying and pasting everything they see.
  "One thing I have learned about Copyright: there are many exceptions! Recently I had the opportunity to copy many pages from a law book that contained mostly Case Laws. Case Laws cannot be copyrighted, so I was able to legally copy the cases, and save myself from having to purchase the book!"
  I felt since someone had taken the time to compile the case studies in one place, probably by theme, the book probably is copyrighted and this is a clear violation. Am I totally off on this?
• December 13, 2010 @ 1:59pmJanetCroft says:

  Just collecting the laws in one place doesn't give the publisher (WestLaw, for example) copyright. Probably most case laws are considered government documents and thus not copyrighted. But any additional commentary may be copyrighted by the republisher, so you'd want to be careful about that.

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