Here’s an interesting 2009 opinion by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals I just saw cited.

It deals with a request that was made for a copy of the transcript of a court proceeding involving the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The summary is short and sweet.

This appeal involves a dispute over payment for transcripts of proceedings in this case. A court reporter prepared the transcripts and delivered the originals to defendant City of Albuquerque, which paid the reporter for them. An attorney obtained copies of the transcripts through a public-records request. The district court decided the reporter was entitled to be paid for the copies obtained from the City of Albuquerque. It erred.

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So do you have to pay the court reporter who transcribed the original court proceeding in order to later obtain a copy from a public agency under a public records law?

That was the question facing the court.

From the opinion:

(The court reporter’s) fee claim rests on the tacit premise that court reporters in some legal sense own the content of the transcripts they prepare, such that they are entitled to remuneration whenever a copy of a transcript is made (even if they played no role in making the copy). To accept this premise would effectively give court reporters a “copyright” in a mere transcription of others’ statements, contrary to black letter copyright law. See 2 William F. Patry, Patry on Copyright, Ch. 4 Noncopyrightable Material, § 4.88 (Updated Sept. 2008) (court reporters are not “authors of what they transcribe and therefore cannot be copyright owners of the transcript of court proceedings”).

And there is a line of cases holding that transcripts independently accessed (such as by simply requesting the case file from the court clerk1) may be viewed and copied as an alternative to purchasing a copy from the court reporter.

This seems to put reporters, and the public, on relatively firm ground when seeking copies of court transcripts without going to the original source.

There are surely other situations where the copy must be certified as accurate by the original reporter, but for the rest of us–perhaps we can relax and ignore the printed warnings that often appear on such documents.

Of course, I haven’t tracked back to see other cases dealing with the same issue.

Perhaps one of the lawyers out there can chime in and help sort out the issue.

For any reporter who deals with documents, it’s a recurring question. That’s why I was glad to find this case.