Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service

SCOTUSCase
Litigants=Feist Publications, Inc.v. Rural Telephone Service Co.
ArgueDate=January 9
ArgueYear=1991
DecideDate=March 27
DecideYear=1991
FullName=Feist Publications, Incorporated v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Incorporated
USVol=499
USPage=340
Citation=111 S. Ct. 1282; 113 L. Ed. 2d 358; 1991 U.S. LEXIS 1856; 59 U.S.L.W. 4251; 18 U.S.P.Q.2D (BNA) 1275; Copy. L. Rep. (CCH) P26,702; 68 Rad. Reg. 2d (P & F) 1513; 18 Media L. Rep. 1889; 121 P.U.R.4th 1; 91 Cal. Daily Op. Service 2217; 91 Daily Journal DAR 3580
Prior=Summary judgment for plaintiff, 663 F. Supp. 214 (D. Kan. 1987); affirmed, 916 F.2d 718 (10th Cir. 1990); affirmed, full opinion at 1990 U.S. App. LEXIS 25881 (10th Cir. 1990); cert. granted, 498 U.S. 808 (1990)
Subsequent=
Holding=A telephone book did not satisfy the minimum originality required by the Constitution to be eligible for copyright protection, and effort and expenditure of resources are not protected by copyright. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed.
SCOTUS=1990-1991
Majority=O'Connor
JoinMajority=Rehnquist, White, Marshall, Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter
Concurrence=Blackmun
LawsApplied=U.S. Const. art. I

"Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co.", 499 U.S. 340 (1991) [cite web| url=http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=499&invol=340| title=The Feist v. Rural Decision] , commonly called just "Feist v. Rural", was a United States Supreme Court case in which Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural had sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable, and that therefore no infringement existed.

Background

Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. is a telephone cooperative providing services for areas in northwest Kansas, with headquarters in the small town of Lenora, in Norton County. The company was under a statutory obligation to compile a phone directory of all their customers free of charge as a condition of their monopoly franchise.

Feist Publications, Inc. specialized in compiling telephone directories from larger geographic areas than Rural from other areas of Kansas. They had licensed the directory of 11 other local directories, with Rural being the only hold-out in the region. Feist went ahead and copied some 4000 entries from Rural's directory. Rural, however, had placed a small number of phony entries to detect copying, and caught Feist.

Prior to this case, the subsistence of copyright in United States law followed the sweat of the brow doctrine which gave copyright to anyone who invested significant amount of time and energy into their work. At trial and appeal level the courts followed this doctrine, siding with Rural.

Ruling of the Court

The ruling of the Court was given by Justice O'Connor. It examined the purpose of copyright and explained the standard of copyrightability as based on originality.

It is a long-standing principle of United States copyright law that "information" is not copyrightable, O'Connor notes, but "collections" of information can be. Rural claimed a collection copyright in its directory. The court clarified that the intent of copyright law was not, as claimed by Rural and some lower courts, to reward the efforts of persons collecting information, but rather "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const. 1.8.8), that is, to encourage creative expression.

Since facts are purely copied from the world around us, O'Connor concludes, "the sine qua non of copyright is originality". However, the standard for creativity is extremely low. It need not be novel, rather it only needs to possess a "spark" or "minimal degree" of creativity to be protected by copyright.

In regard to collections of facts, O'Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself. If Feist were to take the directory and rearrange them it would destroy the copyright owned in the data.

The court ruled that Rural's directory was nothing more than an alphabetic list of all subscribers to its service, which it was required to compile under law, and that no creative expression was involved. The fact that Rural spent considerable time and money collecting the data was irrelevant to copyright law, and Rural's copyright claim was dismissed.

Implications

The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (that is, facts, discoveries, etc.), from any source, is fair game, but cannot contain any of the "expressive" content added by the source author. That includes not only the author's own comments, but also his choice of which facts to cover, his choice of which links to make among the bits of information, his order of presentation (unless it is something obvious like an alphabetical list), any evaluations he may have made about the quality of various pieces of information, or anything else that might be considered "original creative work" of the author rather than mere facts.

For example, a recipe is a process, and not copyrightable, but the words used to describe it are; see "Publications International v Meredith Corp." (1996). ["Publications International v Meredith Corp.", 88 F.3d 473 (7th Cir., 1996)] Therefore, you can rewrite a recipe in your own words and publish it without infringing copyrights. But if you rewrote every recipe from a particular cookbook, you might still be found to have infringed the author's copyright in the choice of recipes and their "coordination" and "presentation", even if you used different words, though the West decisions below suggest that this is unlikely unless there is some significant creativity in the presentation.

Feist proved most important in the area of copyright of legal case law publications. Although one might assume that the text of U.S. case law is in the public domain, Thomson West had claimed a copyright as to the first page citations and internal pin-point page citations of its versions of court opinions (case law) found in its printed versions of the case law ("West's citation claims.") West also had claimed a copyright in the text of its versions of the case law, which included parallel citations and typographical corrections ("West's text claims.") The text claim would have barred anyone from copying the text of a case from a West case law reporter, since the copied text would include West enhancements to which West claimed copyright.

In a pre-Feist case, West's citation copyright claim had been affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in a preliminary injunction case in 1986 brought by West against Mead Data, owner of Lexis. "West v. Mead" (1986) ["West Publishing Co. v. Mead Data Central", [http://showcase.netins.net/web/trhalvorson/law/799_f2d_1219.html 799 F.2d 1219] (8th Cir., 1986)] . West v. Mead was overruled after Feist, in a case commenced in 1994 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. West's citation claims were challenged in 1994 by legal publisher, Matthew Bender & Company and by a small CD-Rom publisher HyperLaw, Inc. HyperLaw intervened, joining Matthew Bender in the citation challenge and separately challenging West's text copyright claims. West was found by the Second Circuit in 1998 not to have a protectable copyright interest in its citations; neither to the first page citations nor to its internal pagination citations. See Matthew Bender v. West, Citation Appeal.Second Circuit - Citation Appeal: [http://www.hyperlaw.com/westlit/litdocs/1998-11-03-second-circuit-opinion-citation-HLvWest-97-74301.html Matthew Bender v. West, 158 F.3d 693 (2d Cir. 1998), "cert. denied", 526 U.S. 1154 (1999) ] .]

In the same case, but in separate decisions in which Matthew Bender was not involved, HyperLaw successfully challenged West's text claims. Judge John S. Martin ruled in favor of HyperLaw against West in a U.S. District Court decision in May, 1996. Matthew Bender v. West, No. 94 Civ. 0589, 1997 WL 266972 (S.D.N.Y. May 19, 1997), "aff'd", 158 F. 3d 674 (2nd Cir. 1998), "cert. denied sub. nom." West v. Hyperlaw, 526 U.S. 1154 (1999). District Court - HyperLaw Text Decision: [http://www.hyperlaw.com/westlit/litdocs/1997-05-19-176-Martin-Order-Text.html Matthew Bender v. West, No. 94 Civ. 0589, 1997 WL 266972 (S.D.N.Y. May 19, 1997), aff'd, 158 F. 3d 674 (2nd Cir. 1998), "cert. denied sub. nom." West v. Hyperlaw, 526 U.S. 1154 (1999).] ] West lost to HyperLaw in its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and certiorari was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.Second Circuit - HyperLaw Text Appeal Decision: [http://www.hyperlaw.com/westlit/litdocs/1998-11-03-second-circuit-opinion-ctation-HLvWest-97-74301.html Matthew Bender v. West, 158 F. 3d 674 (2nd Cir. 1998), "aff'g", No. 94 Civ. 0589, 1997 WL 266972 (S.D.N.Y. May 19, 1997), "cert. denied sub. nom." West v. Hyperlaw, 526 U.S. 1154 (1999)] ]

After the 1986 West v. Mead decision, Mead Data and Lexis were acquired by Reed Elsevier, a large English-Dutch based publisher. During the Matthew Bender v. West case, Reed Elsevier and Matthew Bender entered into a strategic relationship, culminating in Reed Elsevier's acquisition of Matthew Bender in 1998, just after the Second Circuit appeals were argued. Reed Elsevier now was on the side of West and filed an amicus brief opposing HyperLaw and supporting West. Thus, although the name of the case might suggest that Matthew Bender challenged West on the text claim, by the middle of the case Matthew Bender was on the side of West on the text issue. Reed Elsevier's support of West's claims to a copyright in text was consistent with the initiatives, discussed below, to sidestep Feist by implementing database protection, through legislation and treaties discussed below. Similarly, during the case, West was acquired by the Canadian based international publisher, the Thomson Corporation.

Another case covering this area is "Assessment Technologies v. Wiredata" (2003) ["Assessment Technologies v. Wiredata", [http://www.law.pitt.edu/madison/copyright/supplement/assessment_v_wiredata.pdf 350 F.3rd 640] (7th Cir., 2003)] , in which the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a copyright holder in a compilation of public domain data cannot use that copyright to prevent others from using the underlying public domain data, but may only restrict the specific format of the compilation, if that format is itself sufficiently creative. Assessment Technologies also held that it is a fair use of a copyrighted work to reverse engineer that work in order to gain access to uncopyrightable facts. Assessment Technologies also created new law, stating that it is a copyright misuse and an abuse of process if one attempts to use a contract or license agreement based on one's copyright to protect uncopyrightable facts.

In the late 1990s, Congress attempted to pass laws which would protect collections of data, but these measures failed. By contrast, the European Union has a sui generis (specific to that type of work) intellectual property protection for collections of data.

Other countries

The applicability of copyright to phone directories has come up in several other countries.

In Canada, the appeal-level case of "Tele-Direct (Publications) Inc. v. American Business Information Inc." (1997) 76 C.P.R. (3d) 296 (F.C.A.) reached a similar result to that of Feist. However, the Supreme Court partially backed away from the originality doctrine in "CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada". Under the CCH ruling, someone may assert protection in a database where the facts are themselves not copied from another source. eg. A person may assert protection in a collection of her own recipes, but she may not assert protection in a database of facts about persons and their ancestry compiled from census records.

In Australia, the Federal Court decision of "Desktop Marketing Systems v. Telstra" [2002] FCAFC 112 followed the UK approach in "Walter v. Lane" and ruled that copyright law did in-fact follow the "sweat of the brow" doctrine. However, "Desktop v. Telstra" held, as did "CCH Canadian", that collections of facts must not be copied from other sources to be eligible for protection.

Relation with treaties

Congress has been considering whether to implement a treaty negotiated at the World Trade Organization. Part of the Uruguay Round Agreement resulted in text which states, in Part II, Section 1, Article 10:

The text mirrors that of Article 2(5) of the Berne Convention, which applies to "collections of literary or artistic works".

This treaty provision is broadly in line with the United States Copyright Act and the Act's case law, which protects compilations of data whose "selection and arrangement" is sufficiently original. "See" usc|17|101 ("compilation" as defined by the United States Copyright Act includes compilations of data). The standard for such originality is fairly low; for example, business listings have been found to meet this standard when deciding which companies should be listed and categorizing those companies required some kind of expert judgment. "See Key Publ'ns, Inc. v. Chinatown Today Pub. Enters.", 945 F.2d 509 (2d Cir. 1991) (applying "Feist"). As such, implementation of this treaty would not overrule "Feist".

ee also

* List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 499
* Idea-expression divide

References

Further reading

* cite journal | last = Ekstrand | first = Victoria S. | authorlink = | coauthors = | year = 2002 | month = | title = Drawing Swords After "Feist": Efforts to Legislate the Database Pirate | journal = Communication Law and Policy | volume = 7 | issue = 3 | pages = 317–341 | doi = 10.1207/S15326926CLP0703_04 | url = | accessdate = | quote =
* cite journal | last = Ginsburg | first = Jane C. | authorlink = Jane Ginsburg | coauthors = | year = 1992 | month = | title = No ‘Sweat’? Copyright and Other Protection of Works of Information after "Feist v. Rural Telephone" | journal = Columbia Law Review | volume = 92 | issue = 2 | pages = 338–388 | doi = 10.2307/1123087 | url = | accessdate = | quote =
* cite journal | last = Thorner | first = Benjamin B. | authorlink = | coauthors = | year = 1997 | month = | title = Copyright Protection For Computer Databases: The Threat of "Feist" and a Proposed Solution | journal = Virginia Journal of Law and Technology | volume = 1 | issue = 5 | pages = 1522–1687 | id = | url = http://www.vjolt.net/vol1/issue/vol1_art5.pdf | accessdate = | quote =

External links

* [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=499&invol=340 Text of the decision] from FindLaw.com