Encyclopedia > Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service
| Feist Publications, Inc.v. Rural Telephone Service Co. |
Supreme Court of the United States Image File history File links Seal_of_the_United_States_Supreme_Court. ...
| Argued January 9, 1991
Decided March 27, 1991 | | Full case name: | Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc. | | Citations: | 499 U.S. 340; 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 history: | Summary judgment for plaintiff, 663 F. Supp. 214 (D. Kan. 1987); affirmed, reported at 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 history: | | | | 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. | | Court membership | | | | Case opinions | | Majority by: O'Connor | | Joined by: Rehnquist, White, Marshall, Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter | | Concurrence by: Blackmun | | | Laws applied | | U.S. Const. Art. I | Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)[1], commonly called just Feist v. Rural, was a United States Supreme Court case in which Feist copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural 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. William H. Rehnquist has served as the Chief Justice of the United States since 1986. ...
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Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American jurist and the first African American to serve on the United States Supreme Court. ...
Justice Harry Blackmun Harry Andrew Blackmun (November 12, 1908 – March 4, 1999) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. ...
John Paul Stevens John Paul Stevens (born April 20, 1920) is an American jurist and the senior Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. ...
Retired Associate Justice Sandra Day OConnor Sandra Day OConnor (born Sandra Day on March 26, 1930) is a former American judge and politician who served as the first female Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. ...
Justice Antonin Scalia Antonin Gregory Scalia (born March 11, 1936) has been a prominent conservative and originalist voice on the Supreme Court of the United States of America and one of the most outspoken defenders of textualism in statutory interpretation and original meaning in constitutional interpretation. ...
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The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest judicial body in the U.S.. As the highest court, it provides the leadership of the judicial branch of the U.S. federal government. ...
The telephone or phone (Greek: tele = far away and phone = voice) is a telecommunications device which is used to transmit and receive sound (most commonly voice and speech) across distance. ...
Copyright infringement (also known as piracy) is the unauthorized use of copyrighted material in a manner that violates one of the copyright owners exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works that build upon it. ...
Background
Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. was a telephone provider for areas in north-west Kansas. The company was under a statutory obligation to compile a phone directory of all their customers free of charge as condition to their monopoly franchise.
Feist Publications, Inc. specialized in compiling telephone directories from larger geographic areas than Rural. They had licenced 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 that 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 for Rural.
Ruling of the Court The unanimous ruling of the Court was given by Justice O'Connor. In this she examines the purpose of copyright and proposes a new standard for subsistance of copyright based on originality. Retired Associate Justice Sandra Day OConnor Sandra Day OConnor (born Sandra Day on March 26, 1930) is a former American judge and politician who served as the first female Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. ...
Originality refers to something being new or novel. ...
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. Sine qua non or conditio sine qua non was originally a Latin legal term for without which it could not be (but for). It refers to an indispensable and essential action, condition, or ingredient. ...
In the United States, the Constitution grants Congress the power to [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. ...
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. Look up Fact in Wiktionary, the free dictionary A Fact is any of the following: Something actual as opposed to invented. ...
An author is the person who creates a written work, such as a book, story, article or the like. ...
For information on linking pages within Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Links. ...
For example, a recipe is a process, and not copyrightable, but the words used to describe it are. 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. An example recipe, printed from the Wikibooks Cookbook. ...
A cookbook contains information on cooking, and a list of recipes. ...
The text of US Laws is in the public domain, but West Publishing Corporation claims a copyright on the page numbers in its printed edition of those laws. By this reasoning, you could refer to a law or even include large excerpts with impunity, but if you reproduce it in such a way as to deliberately preserve West's page numbers, you might be in trouble. This copyright claim has been defeated in two court cases [2]. West v. Mead (No. 85-5399 799 F.2d 1219)(1986) and Matthew Bender & Company, Inc., & Hyperlaw, Inc., vs. West Publishing Co (No. 97-7430). The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...
Copyright symbol. ...
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The West claim of originality in the way it presented its reports of decisions has also been found to be uncreative and therefore not copyrightable, in Matthew Bender v. West Publishing Co. (158 F.3d 674) [3] (may be known as Hyperlaw, Inc. v. West Publishing Company, 94 Civ. 589 (SDNY 1997)). // Case citation is the system used in common law countries such as the United States, England and Wales, Canada, New Zealand Australia and India to uniquely identify the location of past court cases in special series of books called reporters. ...
// Case citation is the system used in common law countries such as the United States, England and Wales, Canada, New Zealand Australia and India to uniquely identify the location of past court cases in special series of books called reporters. ...
Another case covering this area is Assessment Technologies v. WIREdata [4], which 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.
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. Data is the plural of datum. ...
Pronunciation SOO-eye jen-ER-ihs Sui generis is a (post) Latin expression, literally meaning of its own kind/genus or unique in its characteristics. ...
Other countries The subsistance of copyright in phone directories have come up in several other countries.
In Canada, the appeal-level case of Tele-Direct (Publications) Inc. v. American Business Informations Inc. (1997) 76 C.P.R. (3d) 296 (F.C.A.) reached a similar result to that of Feist. However, the Supreme Court backed away from the originality doctrine in CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada. CCH Canadian Ltd. ...
In Australia, the Federal Court decision of Desktop Marketing Systems Pty Ltd v Telstra [2002] FCAFC 112 followed the UK approach in Walter v. Lane and ruled that subsistance in copyright did in-fact follow the "sweat of the brow" doctrine. Walter v. ...
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: A treaty is a binding agreement under international law concluded by subjects of international law, namely states and international organizations. ...
WTO Logo The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international, multilateral organization, which sets the rules for the global trading system and resolves disputes between its member states, all of whom are signatories to its about 30 agreements. ...
The Uruguay Round was a trade negotiation lasting from September 1986 to April 1994 which transformed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade into the World Trade Organization. ...
- 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 Berne Convention, which applies to "collections of literary or artistic works". This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...
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 17 U.S.C. ยง 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 judgement. 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. The power to enact United States copyright law is granted in Article One, section 8, of the United States Constitution, which states: The Congress shall have Power. ...
Case law (precedential law) is the body of judge-made law and legal decisions that interprets prior case law, statutes and other legal authority -- including doctrinal writings by legal scholars such as the Corpus Juris Secundum, Halsburys Laws of England or the doctinal writings found in the Recueil Dalloz...
The power to enact United States copyright law is granted in Article One, section 8, of the United States Constitution, which states: The Congress shall have Power. ...
References - ^ The Feist v. Rural Decision
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