Can You Use State Statutes in a Commercial Product?

Your team wants to show, store or resell state statute text, and someone asks whether you are allowed to. The honest answer has three parts, and only one of them is about copyright.

Short answer: usually yes for the text itself. Copyright does not attach to the statutes a legislature passes, and some states say so in their own laws. What can stop you is the stuff around the statute: annotations a private publisher owns, a website's terms of use, and material mixed into a vendor's feed that has a different owner. Check those three before you ship.

Written and checked on 12 October 2026. This is general information, not legal advice; check the cited statute or opinion before relying on it.

TL;DR

• The text of a state statute has no copyright. Our post on whether statutes are copyrighted explains why. Some states, such as California and Illinois, also say so in their own statutes.
• A state can still make other claims. Idaho's code says the state owns copyright in compilations of its code.
• A site's terms of use are a separate question. They vary by site, so read them on the day you build.
• Ask any vendor where each section came from. Also ask what is mixed in and what you may redistribute.

Official text, as of 12 October 2026

Citation: California Government Code § 10248.5, added by Stats. 2016, Ch. 441 (AB 884), effective September 22, 2016.

What it says: the information the Legislative Counsel makes available to the public "is within the public domain and the State of California retains no copyright or other proprietary interest in that information." Read it on the California Legislative Information site.

What that information is: Government Code § 10248 lists it. The list includes "The California Codes," "The California Constitution" and "All statutes enacted on or after January 1, 1993."

What changed in 2025 and 2026: the section page we read today shows only its 2016 history line. We did not review any other state's change in 2025 or 2026.

Three questions to ask before you ship

Work through these in order.

1. Who owns the text? For enacted statutes, the answer is nobody. Read the copyright post for the reasons, and for the limit of what the Supreme Court decided.
2. What do the source's terms say? A state site may have terms about copying, storing and automated access. Those are separate from copyright.
3. What else is mixed in? Annotations, headnotes, indexes and summaries can have a different owner from the statute they sit under.

What is free to copy

Federal works. 17 U.S.C. § 105(a) says "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government," though the government may hold copyrights transferred to it. The Government Publishing Office says on its policy page that "public documents can generally be reprinted without legal restriction." Its policy page also warns that a government publication "may contain copyrighted material which was used with permission of the copyright owner."

State statutes. The Supreme Court's government edicts doctrine means legislators cannot be the author of the law they make. The U.S. Copyright Office applies it in its practice manual, where it says it will not register a government edict from any state. The manual's list includes "legislative enactments," "judicial decisions" and "administrative rulings." Administrative rulings are on that same list. We say no more than that about agency rules.

What is not automatically free

• A private publisher's own notes. A publisher that writes notes without any lawmaking role can own them, if they are original. An annotated code from a commercial publisher can contain such notes.
• A publisher's selection and arrangement. In Feist v. Rural Telephone, 499 U.S. 340 (1991), the Court said a compilation of facts gets limited protection for original choices of what to include and how to arrange it. It does not reach the facts.
• A state's own claim. Idaho Code § 73-210 says copyright of all compilations "shall be owned by the state of Idaho." It adds that the Idaho Code Commission may "grant the use of the copyrights." The history line says it was added in 1949. Whether Idaho enforces it today is not verified in our October 2026 review.

What four states say

This is not a 50-state survey. It lists the four states whose own pages we read on 12 October 2026. Texas, Georgia, Washington and all other states are not covered here. The Oregon row is about which text is official, not about copyright. Oregon's page says nothing on copyright that we found.

Illinois adds a twist. Subsection (f) of the same section says the Legislative Reference Bureau must make its electronic database of the statutes available to those who request it, and "shall establish and charge a reasonable fee for providing the information." Public domain for copyright is not the same as free to receive in bulk.

To check any other state, read its legislature's legal notice first. Then look for a statute on how its code is compiled, as Illinois and Idaho have. Do not infer a state's terms from a third-party summary.

For the guides to individual states, see Illinois, Idaho, California and Oregon.

A worked check on one real state page

Take Oregon. The Oregon Legislature's page on the Oregon Revised Statutes says: "The official text is the printed published copy of the Oregon Revised Statutes. The text in the database is not the official text of Oregon law." It tells users to "verify the legal accuracy of all legal text against official sources of Oregon law."

The page shows the 2025 Edition. It says changes from the 2025 special session and the 2026 regular session are not in that edition. They will appear in the 2027 Edition, "available online in early 2028."

What this means for a product:

• Say which edition you used and where you got the text.
• Do not call the web text "the official text."
• Remember the web text can trail the law. Oregon tells readers to check the session laws as well.

What the page does not say: we found nothing about copying or reuse on it. Another Oregon page may cover that. This is not verified.

Questions to ask a data vendor

Our ten questions for a legal data vendor cover sources, currency and exit. These add the rights side:

1. For each state, which site is the source, and can you show a link for each section?
2. Does the feed hold only enacted text, or also notes, headnotes or summaries? Who wrote them?
3. What does the source's legal notice say, and does your licence sit on top of it or replace it?
4. What may I store, show, resell, put in a mobile app or use to train a model? Ask in writing. Do not guess.
5. What credit do I owe, to whom, and in what form?
6. What happens when a state changes its terms or its code edition?
7. Which text is official, and how will my users be told?
8. Who is responsible if a section is wrong or out of date?

Our buyer's guide to legal data has the wider context.

What goes wrong

• A team reads "public domain" and ships the annotated edition from a paid database. The statute text was free. The notes were not.
• A footer says "all rights reserved" and the team drops the state. The notice may cover other content, or be wrong.
• The web text is labelled unofficial, and the product calls it "the law." Users cannot tell.
• A vendor contract is read once and never again. The source changed.

Scraping adds more questions, about robots files (the rules a site posts for automated visitors), server load and terms. Those are covered in what breaks when you scrape state legislature sites. Our guide to build or buy for legal data compares the routes.

This guide is part of US Law Data: The Complete Guide, a map of where US law comes from and how to use it.

FAQ

Can I use state statutes commercially?

Usually the text, yes. Check for notes, the source's terms and any mixed-in material first.

Is state law public domain?

The text of enacted statutes is outside copyright. California and Illinois say "public domain" in their own statutes. Idaho's code claims ownership of compilations, so read the state's own page. See the copyright post for what the Georgia case did and did not decide.

Can a state stop me from copying its code?

It depends on what the state claims. That might be annotations, a compilation or the site's terms. Do not assume a state "cannot," because the Supreme Court's Georgia decision did not rule on a state that claims its text or numbering.

Can I scrape a state legislature website?

Copyright is one question. Terms of use, robots files and server load are others. We reach no conclusion either way here, and our scraping guide shows what to check.

Does this change for regulations and local ordinances?

The Copyright Office's list of edicts it will not register includes administrative rulings and public ordinances. A site's terms can still differ for each source.

Do I need to credit the source?

Not as a copyright duty for federal works. The GPO says "customary credit" should be given to the agency when permission to reprint is granted. Many sites ask for credit in their terms. Credit also helps your users verify the text.

What does a licensed vendor feed give me that the free text does not?

If the vendor supplies them, a clear rights statement, a source link for each section and a refresh process. Ask for each in writing, using the list above.

For the US statutes, regulations and court rules these laws sit in, see the US primary law API.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill AI: the pipelines that pull statutes, regulations and court rules from every US jurisdiction's official publisher, and the REST API, MCP server and open dataset that serve them.