Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service
Encyclopedia
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), commonly called Feist v. Rural, is an important United States Supreme Court
case establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. 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.
, 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. Despite Rural's denial of a license to Feist, Feist copied some 4000 entries from Rural's directory. Because Rural had placed a small number of phony entries
to detect copying, Feist was caught.
Prior to 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.
. 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.
s, 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 idea-expression divide
and Publications International v Meredith Corp. (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; 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 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); 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 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. 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. 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). 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.
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), 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.
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. For example, 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 Telstra v Desktop Marketing Systems [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.
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 ("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.
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
case establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings
Telephone directory
A telephone directory is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organization that publishes the directory...
to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement
Copyright infringement
Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...
. 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 LenoraLenora, Kansas
Lenora is a city in Norton County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 250.-Geography:Lenora is located at . According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , all of it land.-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 306...
, in Norton County
Norton County, Kansas
Norton County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kansas. As of the 2010 census, the county population was 5,671...
. 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. Despite Rural's denial of a license to Feist, Feist copied some 4000 entries from Rural's directory. Because Rural had placed a small number of phony entries
Fictitious entry
Fictitious entries, also known as fake entries, Mountweazels, ghost word and nihil articles, are deliberately incorrect entries or articles in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, and directories. Entries in reference works normally originate from a reliable external source,...
to detect copying, Feist was caught.
Prior to this case, the substance of copyright in United States law followed the sweat of the brow
Sweat of the brow
"Sweat of the brow" is an intellectual property law doctrine, chiefly related to copyright law. According to this doctrine, an author gains rights through simple diligence during the creation of a work, such as a database, or a directory...
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 O'ConnorSandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor is an American jurist who was the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States. She served as an Associate Justice from 1981 until her retirement from the Court in 2006. O'Connor was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981...
. It examined the purpose of copyright and explained the standard of copyrightability as based on originality
Originality
Originality is the aspect of created or invented works by as being new or novel, and thus can be distinguished from reproductions, clones, forgeries, or derivative works....
.
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
Copyright Clause
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress:- Other Terms :This clause is also referred to as:* Copyright and Patent Clause* Patent and Copyright Clause...
), that is, to encourage creative expression.
Since facts are purely copied from the world around us, O'Connor concludes, "the sine qua non
Sine qua non
Sine qua non or condicio sine qua non refers to an indispensable and essential action, condition, or ingredient...
of copyright is originality". However, the standard for creativity
Threshold of originality
The threshold of originality is a concept in copyright law that is used to assess whether or not a particular work can be copyrighted. It is used to distinguish works that are sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection from those that are not...
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, factFact
A fact is something that has really occurred or is actually the case. The usual test for a statement of fact is verifiability, that is whether it can be shown to correspond to experience. Standard reference works are often used to check facts...
s, discoveries, etc.), from any source, is fair game, but cannot contain any of the "expressive" content added by the source author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
. 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
Recipe
A recipe is a set of instructions that describe how to prepare or make something, especially a culinary dish.-Components:Modern culinary recipes normally consist of several components*The name of the dish...
is a process, and not copyrightable, but the words used to describe it are; see idea-expression divide
Idea-expression divide
The idea–expression divide or idea–expression dichotomy limits the scope of copyright protection by differentiating an idea from the expression or manifestation of that idea.The case of Baker v. Selden was the first U.S...
and Publications International v Meredith Corp. (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
Cookbook
A cookbook is a kitchen reference that typically contains a collection of recipes. Modern versions may also include colorful illustrations and advice on purchasing quality ingredients or making substitutions...
, 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; 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 in the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
, Thomson West
Thomson West
West publishes legal, business, and regulatory information in print, and on electronic services such as Westlaw. Since the late 19th century, West has been one of the most prominent publishers of legal materials in the United States...
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
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
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); 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 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. 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. 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). West lost to HyperLaw in its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and certiorari
Certiorari
Certiorari is a type of writ seeking judicial review, recognized in U.S., Roman, English, Philippine, and other law. Certiorari is the present passive infinitive of the Latin certiorare...
was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.
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), 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
Fair use
Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...
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
Copyright misuse
Copyright misuse is an equitable defense against copyright infringement in the United States. Under this defense, a copyright infringer may avoid infringement liability if the copyright holder has engaged in abusive or improper conduct in exploiting or enforcing the copyright...
and an abuse of process
Abuse of process
Abuse of process is a cause of action in tort arising from one party making a malicious and deliberate misuse or perversion of regularly issued court process not justified by the underlying legal action.It is a common law intentional tort...
if one attempts to use a contract
Contract
A contract is an agreement entered into by two parties or more with the intention of creating a legal obligation, which may have elements in writing. Contracts can be made orally. The remedy for breach of contract can be "damages" or compensation of money. In equity, the remedy can be specific...
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
Data
The term data refers to qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which...
, but these measures failed. By contrast, the European Union
European Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
has a sui generis
Sui generis
Sui generis is a Latin expression, literally meaning of its own kind/genus or unique in its characteristics. The expression is often used in analytic philosophy to indicate an idea, an entity, or a reality which cannot be included in a wider concept....
(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
CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada
CCH Canadian Limited v. Law Society of Upper Canada, [2004] 1 S.C.R. 339, is a landmark Supreme Court of Canada case that establishes the bounds of fair dealing in Canadian copyright law. A group of publishers sued the Law Society of Upper Canada for copyright infringement for providing photocopy...
. Under the CCH ruling, someone may assert protection in a database where the facts are themselves not copied from another source. For example, 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 Telstra v Desktop Marketing Systems [2002] FCAFC 112 followed the UK approach in Walter v. Lane
Walter v. Lane
Walter v. Lane [1900] AC 539, was a judgement of the House of Lords on the question of Authorship under the Literary Copyright Act 1842. It has come to be recognised as a seminal case on the notion of originality in copyright law.-Facts:...
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 treatyTreaty
A treaty is an express agreement under international law entered into by actors in international law, namely sovereign states and international organizations. A treaty may also be known as an agreement, protocol, covenant, convention or exchange of letters, among other terms...
negotiated at the World Trade Organization
World Trade Organization
The World Trade Organization is an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade. The organization officially commenced on January 1, 1995 under the Marrakech Agreement, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade , which commenced in 1948...
. Part of the Uruguay Round Agreement
Uruguay Round
The Uruguay Round was the 8th round of Multilateral trade negotiations conducted within the framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade , spanning from 1986-1994 and embracing 123 countries as “contracting parties”. The Round transformed the GATT into the World Trade Organization...
resulted in text which states, in Part II, Section 1, Article 10:
The text mirrors that of Article 2(5) of the Berne Convention
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works
The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, is an international agreement governing copyright, which was first accepted in Berne, Switzerland in 1886.- Content :...
, 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
Case law
In law, case law is the set of reported judicial decisions of selected appellate courts and other courts of first instance which make new interpretations of the law and, therefore, can be cited as precedents in a process known as stare decisis...
, which protects compilations of data whose "selection and arrangement" is sufficiently original. See ("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.
See also
- List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 499
- List 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 divideIdea-expression divideThe idea–expression divide or idea–expression dichotomy limits the scope of copyright protection by differentiating an idea from the expression or manifestation of that idea.The case of Baker v. Selden was the first U.S...
- Threshold of originalityThreshold of originalityThe threshold of originality is a concept in copyright law that is used to assess whether or not a particular work can be copyrighted. It is used to distinguish works that are sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection from those that are not...
External links
- Text of the decision from FindLaw.com