Court overturns ruling in SBCCI case. (Headlines).

Overturning a prior ruling in favor of the Southern Building Code Congress International (SBCCI), Birmingham, Alabama, which sued an individual for posting SBCCI's model code on his Web site, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that an association may lose its ability to copyright model building codes once those codes become law. The individual who posted the code, Peter Veeck, argued that incorporation of the code by reference by the municipal governments of Anna and Savoy, Texas, caused SBCCI to lose copyright ownership of the code. However, both the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas and the Fifth Circuit affirmed SBCCI's copyright of the codes posted on the Web site.

Upon a decision to rehear the case in front of the entire panel of judges, the Fifth Circuit reversed the ruling. The court ruled that once the model codes were promulgated into law, they entered public domain and could no longer be considered protected works. Moreover, the court agreed with Veeck's argument that once adopted into law, the model codes became "unique, unalterable expressions of the 'idea' that constitutes local law" and could not be protected by the Copyright Act. The court noted, however, that "the results in this case would have been different if Veeck had published not the building codes of Anna and Savoy, Texas, but the SBCCI model codes, as model codes."

In one of two dissenting opinions, one judge expressed concern about the court's sweeping decision that "once a copyrighted work is enacted into law by reference, it loses its entire copyright protection...regardless of the nature of the author, the character of the work, or the relationship of the copier to the work or to the governmental subdivision that enacted the work into law." ASAE joined several other associations in an amicus brief arguing in favor of SBCCI's position.