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Feist v. Rural

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Feist v. Rural

Supreme Court of the United States

Argued January 9, 1991

Decided March 27, 1991

Full case

nameFeist Publications, Incorporated v.Rural Telephone Service Company,

Incorporated

Citations

499U.S.340(more)

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, 916F.2d718 (10th Cir.

1990); affirmed, full opinion at 1990

U.S. App. LEXIS 25881 (10th Cir.

1990);cert.granted, 498 U.S. 808

(1990)

Holding

The white pages of 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

Chief Justice

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William Rehnquist

Associate JusticesByron WhiteThurgood Marshall

Harry BlackmunJohn P. StevensSandra Day O'ConnorAntonin Scalia

Anthony KennedyDavid Souter

Case opinions

Majority

O'Connor, joined by Rehnquist,

White, Marshall, Stevens, Scalia,

Kennedy, Souter

Concurrence Blackmun

Laws applied

U.S. Const. art. I

Feist Publ ications, I nc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991),[1]commonlycalled Feist v. Rural, is an importantUnited States Supreme Courtcase establishing thatinformation alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. In

the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural'stelephone listingsto include in its

own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued forcopyright infringement.The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and

that therefore no infringement existed.

Contents

1 Background

2 Ruling of the Court 3 Implications

o 3.1 Other countries 4 Relation with treaties 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links

Background

Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. is atelephone cooperativeproviding services for areasin northwest Kansas, with headquarters in the small town ofLenora, inNorton 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.

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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. Despite Rural's denial of a licenseto Feist, Feist copied some 4000 entries from Rural's directory. Because Rural had placed a small

number ofphony entriesto detect copying, Feist was caught.

Prior to this case, the substance of copyright in United States law followed thesweat 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 byJustice O'Connor. It examined the purpose of copyrightand explained the standard of copyrightability as based onoriginality.

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 acollection 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 collectinginformation, 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, "thesine qua non

of copyright is originality". However, thestandard for creativityis 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 creativeaspects 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 wasinvolved. The fact that Rural spent considerable time and money collecting the data was

irrelevant to copyright law, and Rural's copyright claim was dismissed.

ImplicationsSee also:Idea-expression divideandThreshold of originality

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 sourceauthor. That includes not only the author'sown comments, but also his choice of which facts to cover, his choice of which links to make

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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 authorrather than mere facts.

For example, arecipeis a process, and not copyrightable, but the words used to describe it are;seeidea-expression divideandPublications International v Meredith Corp.(1996).[2]

Therefore,

you can rewrite a recipe in your own words and publish it without infringing copyrights. But, if

you rewrote every recipe from a particularcookbook, you might still be found to have infringedthe author's copyright in the choice of recipes and their "coordination" and "presentation", even if

you used different words; however, the West decisions below suggest that this is unlikely unless

there is some significant creativity carried over from the original 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 inpublic domain,Thomson Westhad 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.") Westalso 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 barredanyone 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 citationcopyrightclaim 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);[3]

however, 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 theSecond 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 smallCD-Rom publisher HyperLaw, Inc. HyperLaw intervened, joining Matthew Bender in thecitation 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.

[4]The Second Circuit thereby rejected the 1996 determination of a Minnesota

district court in Oasis Publishing Co. v. West Publishing Co., 924 F.Supp. 918 (D. Minn. 1996),

that the outcome of West is not changed by Feist.

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).[5]

West lost to

HyperLaw in its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit andcertiorariwas

denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.[6]

After the 1986 West v. Mead decision, Mead Data and Lexis were acquired by Reed Elsevier, alarge English-Dutch based publisher. During the Matthew Bender v. West case, Reed Elsevier

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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 andsupporting 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 wasconsistent with the initiatives, discussed below, to sidestep Feist by implementing databaseprotection, 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 isAssessment Technologies v. Wiredata(2003),[7]

in which the

Seventh Circuit Court of Appealsruled 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 afair useof a copyrighted work toreverse

engineerthat work in order to gain access to uncopyrightable facts. Assessment Technologies

also created new law, stating that it is acopyright misuseand anabuse of processif one attemptsto use acontractorlicense agreementbased on one's copyright to protect uncopyrightable facts.

In the late 1990s, Congress attempted to pass laws which would protect collections ofdata,[8]

but

these measures failed.[9]

By contrast, theEuropean Unionhas asui generis(specific to that type

of work)intellectual property protection for collections of data