Trademark laws traditionally cover intellectual materials of a short kind. This doesn’t mean a thousand page document cannot be Trademarked, but it is unlikely the document can achieve usage and application statistics required of the designation.
Copyright laws are far more applicable when analyzing whether or not a book of laws can possess and access additional legal rights regarding publication and distribution. Copyright laws tend to divide materials into two realms; public and private.
Private copyright ownership is most commonly found amongst the artistic materials being produced using a variety of communications mediums, including pen, camera, recorder, software, etc. By theory, there is no need to register an original work of art other than affixing the copyright symbol, the year and the owner of the rights. However, for evidentiary purposes, the United States maintains a Copyright Office and offers a registration service for the original work of art.
Although this registration service is not mandatory, it is uncommon for original materials to be leveraged in contract formation (royalties, buy/sell, transfer, etc.) and defending against infringement hinges on the composers ability to prove beyond reasonable doubt they were the originators of the materials and that the duplication and/or distribution was unauthorized.
Public domain materials, on the other hand, have a different threshold to achieve. Because the materials are theoretically owned by the public, such as the United States Constitution, The Declaration of Independence and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, access and distribution of the materials does not need written permission of any kind from the owners and in reverse, distribution is encouraged and supported.
Fair Use arguments surface frequently in the private copyright ownership arena, such as the extraction and citation of a quote from another source of materials. A variety of educational systems demand bibliographies and other annotations to be attached to assignments so that an examiner of the work can quickly reference a point of matter the author included as part and parcel of an otherwise original composition.
Pragmatically speaking, a student cannot be expected to track and trace every owner of every piece of material in order to pay royalties for use of the materials, let alone seeking permission to duplicate but one sentence in particular prior to submitting the assignment to the examiner. Borrowing from audio sampling debates and arguments, even audio segments have elasticity in their distance before crossing into something other than fair and reasonable use of said materials.
Fair Use also permits assigning a dollar amount to reproducing and distributing a public document. The key to this particular level of permission is a cost control conundrum. A person is permitted to recoup the costs of such reproduction and distribution by assigning a price to their composition, but there is not much distance between reasonable and unreasonable assignment of cost to perform such an activity – even if it’s a one-time only event – before price distortion options take over, such as the purchase of but one composition via an auction site. Whatever drives the price of one sale may not drive the sale of another copy of the identical content.
Therefore, a book of laws at any level of a system of government cannot theoretically be of private ownership and that only public domain practices and principles can apply, primarily due to the political position it places the producers and enforcers of said documents. It is logical that in a free society, part of the sense of freeness is derived from mass opportunity for virtually unobstructed reading of the laws being expected to be civily adhered to – with the critical component being accessibility by the masses and not by a select few who can afford the price tags being attached by both the public and private sector.
