There's a little more to it than that -- "the laws" are clearly beyond the reach of copyright and have been forever. What this case is about was some kind of a

There's a little more to it than that -- "the laws" are clearly beyond the reach of copyright and have been forever. What this case is about was some kind of annotated version of the statutes that included case notes and precedents and such. Georgia tried to claim that was subject to copyright. The Justices disagreed, claiming that the annotations were primarily created by legislators in the course of doing legislative work, and thus also could not be copyrighted.