Court transcripts and copyright awards

Ah, the chal­lenges of equat­ing pro­duc­tion with copy­right (a very Lockean con­cept, incidentally):

The prob­lem? The city and the court reporter who recorded the tran­scripts would have charged a much higher fee for a copy of the tran­scripts, and felt that the lawyer’s use of the law to gain access was some­how unfair. The court then ordered the lawyer to pay the court reporter over $4,000 to make up the “dif­fer­ence.” The lawyer, how­ever, appealed, and the appeals court has thrown out the lower court rul­ing, say­ing that forc­ing the lawyer to pay the higher fee would mean that the court reporter effec­tively was given a copy­right to the transcripts

via Techdirt.

It may not be “fair” to the court reporter that his or her work prod­uct should be avail­able for less than they wish to sell it for — but the point of copy­right and IP is about bal­anc­ing pub­lic and pri­vate inter­ests (and in pro­mot­ing progress, in Constitutional terms), not about award­ing own­er­ship to pro­duc­ers. The court reporter was already paid for their effort and work, after all. The pub­lic inter­est then is best served by not award­ing future monop­oly own­er­ship to them. Which is, I expect, pretty much what the appeals court decided.