Gary's call for a lawyer may not help.  Here is a short section from my
book, Steal this Idea --I did not get to choose the title.

	The Law as Intellectual Property
Intellectual property rights obviously depend upon the law, but until
recently, one company virtually claimed the law itself as an intellectual
property right.  West Publishing Co. of Egan, Minnesota, had a contract
with the government to print the federal case law.  Like most books, these
law books have page numbers to allow people to locate specific passages
more easily.
	Today, lawyers increasingly rely upon computer-assisted legal research to
access prior legal decisions throughout the nation.  Two companies dominate
online access to legal information, West Publishing's Westlaw and Reed
Elsevier's Lexis-Nexis.  This market is extraordinarily lucrative.  A
single large law firm can spend millions of dollars in fees annually for
online research.
	West built its own database in the 1970s and 1980s by sending its law
books to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, where low-paid clerks
laboriously keypunched the information.  Lexis and West litigated for years
about whether West could copyright its page-numbering system, which many
courts have long required attorneys to use in legal papers.  Finally, in
1988, Lexis agreed to pay a license fee to West for its page-numbering
system (Bravin 2000).
	More recently, two smaller companies, Matthew Bender and HyperLaw, wanted
to compile case law on CD-ROMs to offer a relatively inexpensive
alternative to the online services.  West challenged these competitors
charging that they had not merely printed legal cases.  Again, West based
its claims on its system of page numbering.  The company maintained that
although the legal decisions might be in the public domain, its numbering
of the pages added value to the material.  Consequently, the corporation
was justified in copyrighting its page numbering.
	According to West's position, vendors of CD-ROMs could still publish the
cases, but they could not indicate which text fell on which page of the
printed version.  In 1995, West attempted to get the Congress to give
legislative authority for its copyright under the so-called "Paperwork
Reduction Act."  This attempt failed.  West also sued Matthew Bender and
Hyperlaw for copyright infringement.  It lost that suit as well in a
federal appeals court in 1997.  Reed Elsevier eventually swallowed up
Matthew Bender, but Hyperlaw remained vulnerable to West.  Two years later,
the Supreme Court finally refused to hear West's appeal.
	Before celebrating the ultimate legal outcome, keep in mind that such
legal challenges are expensive for a small company.  Also, consider that
the decision of the appeals court was a split decision.  One of the three
judges agreed with West.  The outcome of the legislative effort failed only
because of an intense lobbying effort.  Finally, the favorable outcome was
probably not unrelated to the fact that lawyers as a group had a vested
interest in this case.  Many are consumers of the expensive services of
West Publishing or its competitor, Lexis-Nexis, and would most likely
appreciate the existence of competitors that could drive down the prices of
computer-aided legal research.
	The fact that West could even consider claiming the page breaks in a text
as intellectual property suggests how absurd the whole system has become. 
During the early stages of this dispute in September 1994, Bob Oakley, the
Washington, D.C. representative of the American Association of Law
Libraries, wrote to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno: "[I]t is a
fundamental part of our belief that no one should own the law, either
outright or in practical effect ....  Regrettably, the assertion of
ownership of some parts of the published case law together with the
requirements of courts and others to cite certain privately published
versions of the case law have, in practical effect, given one publisher
substantial control over the legal information market" (cited in Daly and
Ward 1994).
	From another perspective, West Publishing may have had a point.  Since the
law seems to support so much nonsense regarding intellectual property,
treating the law itself as intellectual property might be fitting.  The
added expense and inconvenience for lawyers who need to access the law as
private property could act as a useful reminder to lawyers and judges about
the need for caution in pushing intellectual property rights in directions
that nobody, until recently, had even imagined.
	In other cases, one would have to search harder to find a justification. 
California and 47 other states have building codes that are copyrighted by
one of three nonprofit organizations.  The federal government requires U.S.
physicians to use a medical billing code that's owned by the American
Medical Association.  The National Fire Protection Association's
copyrighted 900-page electrical code is in force, in one form or another,
in all 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and Guam.  In all of these cases, people
are expected to follow public laws, which are also private intellectual
property.  A printed copy of the California Building Code costs $738
(Balint 2001).  Legal challenges are underway, but they have not succeeded
so far.

Michael Perelman