Intellectual Property
consent. Rural sued for copyright infringement.
FEIST PUBLICATIONS, INC.
v.
RURAL TELEPHONE SERVICE CO., INCERNESTO M. FULLERO,
petitioner,
vs.
PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES, respondent.
499 U.S. 340 (1991)
Argued January 9, 1991.
Decided March 27, 1991.
Nature of Case:
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE
TENTH CIRCUIT
BRIEF
This case requires us to clarify the extent of copyright protection
available to telephone directory white pages.
Synopsis of Rule of Law. To qualify for copyright
protection, a work must be original to the author, which means
that the work was independently created by the author, and it
possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. A work
may be original even though it closely resembles other works so
long as the similarity is fortuitous, not the result of copying.
FACTS
Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. (Plaintiff) provides
telephone service to several communities. Due to a state
regulation, it must issue an annual telephone directory, so it
published a directory consisting of white and yellow pages. The
yellow pages have advertisements that generate revenue. Feist
Publications, Inc. (Defendant) is a publishing company whose
directory covers a larger range than a typical directory. Defendant
distributes their telephone books free of charge, and they also
generate revenue through the advertising in the yellow pages.
Plaintiff refused to give a license to Defendant for the phone
numbers in the area, so Defendant used them without Plaintiffs
ISSUE/S of the CASE
Whether Rural's white pages are not entitled to copyright.
ACTIONS of the COURT
The District Court granted summary judgment to Rural in its
copyright infringement suit, holding that telephone directories are
copyrightable.
The Court of Appeals affirmed.
SC: Rural's white pages are not entitled to copyright, and therefore
Feist's use of them does not constitute infringement.
COURT RATIONALE ON THE ABOVE FACTS
Facts cannot be copyrighted, however compilations of facts can
generally be copyrighted.
To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the
author, which means that the work was independently created by
the author, and it possesses at least some minimal degree of
creativity. A work may be original even though it closely resembles
other works so long as the similarity is fortuitous, not the result of
copying.
Facts are not original. The first person to find and report a particular
fact has not created the fact; he has merely discovered its
existence. Facts may not be copyrighted and are part of the public
domain available to every person.
A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only
if its facts have been "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a
way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work
of authorship."(emphasis added). Thus, the statute envisions that
some ways of selecting, coordinating, and arranging data are not
sufficiently original to trigger copyright protection. Even a
compilation that is copyrightable receives only limited protection,
for the copyright does not extend to facts contained in the
compilation.
Factual compilations may possess the requisite originality. The
author chooses what facts to include, in what order to place them,
and how to arrange the collected date so they may be effectively
used by readers. Thus, even a directory that contains no written
expression that could be protected, only facts, meets the
constitutional minimum for copyright protection if it features an
original selection or arrangement. But, even though the format is
original, the facts themselves do not become original through
association. The copyright on a factual compilation is limited to
formatting. The copyright does not extend to the facts themselves.
To establish copyright infringement, two elements must be proven:
ownership of a valid copyright and copying of constituent elements
of the work that are original. The first element is met in this case
because the directory contains some forward text. As to the second
element, the information contains facts, which cannot be
copyrighted. They existed before being reported and would have
continued to exist if a telephone directory had never been
published. There is no originality in the formatting, so there is no
copyrightable expression. Thus, there is no copyright infringement.