Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co.
Feist v. Rural | |
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Court membership | |
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Case opinions | |
Majority | O'Connor, joined by Rehnquist, White, Marshall, Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter |
Concurrence | Blackmun |
Laws applied | |
U.S. Const. Art. I § 8 |
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright.[1] In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural 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
Feist Publications, Inc. specialized in compiling telephone directories from larger geographic areas than Rural from other areas of Kansas. It had licensed the directory of 11 other local directories, with Rural being the only holdout in the region. Despite Rural's denial of a license to Feist, Feist copied 4,000 entries from Rural's directory. Because Rural had placed a small number of phony entries to detect copying, Feist was caught.
Before this case, the substance 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 written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. It examined the purpose of copyright and explained the standard of copyrightability as based on originality.
The case centered on two well-established principles in United States copyright law: that facts are not copyrightable, and that compilations of facts can be.
"There is an undeniable tension between these two propositions", O'Connor wrote in her opinion. "Many compilations consist of nothing but raw data—i.e. wholly factual information not accompanied by any original expression. On what basis may one claim a copyright upon such work? Common sense tells us that 100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place. … The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable: The "Sine qua non of copyright is originality."
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—the so-called "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" doctrine—but rather "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const. Art. I, § 8, cl. 8)—that is, to encourage creative expression.
The standard for creativity is extremely low. It need not be novel; it need only possess a "spark" or "minimal degree" of creativity to be protected by copyright.
In regard to collections of facts, O'Connor wrote that copyright can apply only 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.—not to the information itself. If Feist were to take the directory and rearrange it, it would destroy the copyright owned in the data. "Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement", she wrote.
The court held 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. That Rural spent considerable time and money collecting the data was irrelevant to copyright law, and Rural's copyright claim was dismissed.
All the justices joined O'Connor's opinion except Harry Blackmun, who concurred only in judgment, but did not file a separate opinion.[2]
Implications
The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (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 their choice of which facts to cover, which links to make among the bits of information, the order of presentation (unless it is something obvious like alphabetical), evaluations of the quality of various pieces of information, or anything else that might be considered the author's "original creative work" rather than mere facts.
For example, a
Feist proved most important in the area of copyright of legal case law publications. One might assume that the text of U.S. case law is in
In a 1986 pre-Feist case, West's citation copyright claim was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in a preliminary injunction case brought by West against Mead Data, owner of Lexis (West v. Mead),[5] but in a case commenced in 1994 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found Feist to have undermined the reasoning in West v. Mead. 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. In 1998, the Second Circuit found that West did not have a protectable copyright interest in its first-page citations or its internal pagination citations (Matthew Bender v. West, Citation Appeal).[6] The Second Circuit thereby rejected a Minnesota district court's 1996 determination (Oasis Publishing Co. v. West Publishing Co., 924 F.Supp. 918, D. Minn.) that Feist does not change the outcome of West.
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 HyperLaw's favor against West in the May 1996 U.S. District Court decision 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).[7] West lost to HyperLaw on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari.[8]
After West v. Mead, Mead Data and Lexis were acquired by
Another case covering this area is
In the late 1990s, Congress attempted to pass laws to protect collections of data,[10] but the measures failed.[11] 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
In Australia, the Federal Court decision
In India, the Supreme Court case Eastern Book Company & Ors vs D.B. Modak & Anr (where the respondents had compiled CD-ROMs of Supreme Court rulings with text sourced from copyedited publications of them by Eastern Book Company, albeit with copyrightable headnotes and other original content removed) cited both Feist and CCH Canadian, establishing that a work needed to demonstrate labor or effort—but not only labor—in order to be an "original", copyrightable work. In this case, the Court held that the copy-edited text of public domain court documents did not "depict independent creation even a modicum of creativity." This ruling contrasted previous rulings such as Govindan v E.M. Gopalakrishna Kone and Burlington Home Shipping Pvt Ltd v Rajnish Chibber, which followed the British approach of skill and labor.
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 that reads, in Part II, Section 1, Article 10:
Compilations of data or other material, whether in machine readable or other form, which by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents constitute intellectual creations shall be protected as such. Such protection, which shall not extend to the data or material itself, shall be without prejudice to any copyright subsisting in the data or material itself.
The text mirrors that of Article 2(5) of the
This treaty provision is broadly in line with the
See also
- List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 499
- Lists of United States Supreme Court cases
- Lists of United States Supreme Court cases by volume
- List of United States Supreme Court cases by the Rehnquist Court
- Idea–expression divide
- Threshold of originality
- Sui generis database right
References
- ^ Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991).
- ^ Miller, Philip H. (1991). "Life After Feist: Facts, the First Amendment, and the Copyright Status of Automated Databases". Fordham L. Rev. 60 (3): 507–539.
- ^ Publications International v. Meredith Corp., 88 F.3d 473 (7th Cir., 1996)
- ^ "The Law of Recipes: Are Recipes Patentable?" (Feb 10, 2012) IPWatchdog
- ^ West Publishing Co. v. Mead Data Central, 799 F.2d 1219 Archived 2005-11-29 at the Wayback Machine (United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, 1986)
- ^ Second Circuit - Citation Appeal: Matthew Bender v. West, 158 F.3d 693 (2d Cir. 1998), cert. denied, 526 U.S. 1154 (1999) .
- ^ District Court - HyperLaw Text Decision: 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).
- ^ Second Circuit - HyperLaw Text Appeal Decision: 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) Archived May 13, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Assessment Technologies v. Wiredata, 350 F.3rd 640 Archived 2006-05-27 at the Wayback Machine (7th Cir., 2003)
- ^ H.R. 2652, Collections of Information Antipiracy Act 1998
- ^ Armageddon on the Potomac: the Collections of Information Antipiracy Act 1999
- Desktop Marketing Systems Pty Ltd v Telstra Corporation Limited [2002] FCAFC 112 (15 May 2002), Federal Court (Full Court)(Australia)
- ^ Telstra Corporation Ltd v Phone Directories Company Pty Ltd [2010] FCA 44 (8 February 2010), Federal Court (Australia)
- ^ IceTV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd [2009] HCA 14, (2009) 239 CLR 458 (22 April 2009), High Court (Australia)
Further reading
- Ekstrand, Victoria S. (2002). "Drawing Swords After Feist: Efforts to Legislate the Database Pirate". Communication Law and Policy. 7 (3): 317–341. S2CID 143547945.
- JSTOR 1123087.
- Thorner, Benjamin B. (1997). "Copyright Protection For Computer Databases: The Threat of Feist and a Proposed Solution" (PDF). Virginia Journal of Law and Technology. 1 (5): 1522–1687.
External links
- Works related to Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service at Wikisource
- Text of Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) is available from: Findlaw Google Scholar Justia Library of Congress Oyez (oral argument audio)