Even the U.S. Supreme Court says state laws can't be copyrighted, but California gives some private entities ownership rights. : Let’s say you’re a volunteer firefighter and you want to buy a copy of the California fire code and copy it for your fellow volunteers. By doing so, you’re breaking the law, according to the state; each of them would have to buy it separately from a national fire safety organization, for a couple of hundred dollars a shot. “We think that’s nuts,” Carl Malamud told me.