FEIST PUBLICATION, INC. V. RURAL TELEPHONE SERVICE COMPANY 499 U.S. 340
FACTS
- Rural Telephone Service Company is a certified telephonic service provider operating in Kansas. Owing to a state regulation it is subjected to print and issue a telephone directory consisting information about individual subscriber in the white pages and advertisements of subscribers on the yellow pages. Feist Publication is a publication company which specializes in area-wide telephone directories. Unlike a typical directory, which covers a specific area, Feist publishes a directory which covers a much larger geographical area.
- Rural Inc. is the sole provider of telephone services in that particular area in Kansas, it obtains the information for the directory quite easily. However, Feist just being a publication house lacks independent access to any subscriber information therefore approaches individual telephone service provider companies for information. 10 out of 11 companies shared the information such that Feist could publish it in their respective directory but Rural Inc. trying to attract the subscribers in its area for yellow page advertisements did not.
- Despite being denied the information of the subscribers in that particular region of Kansas, Feist Publication went ahead and used the white pages listing of Rural’s directory without their consent but added additional information such as address which was not present in the Rural’s version. Due to the presence of 4 fictitious listings that Rural had inserted into its directory to detect copying, Feist was sued by them for copyright infringement.
PROCEDURAL HISTORY
- Rural Inc. sued Feist Publication for copyright infringement in the District Court for the District of Kansas stating that Feist’s employees were obliged to travel door-todoor or conduct a telephone survey to discover the information which they had copied.
- District Court granted a summary judgment to Rural, explaining that “courts have consistently held that telephone directories are copyrightable”. An appeal was preferred from the judgment to the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit which affirmed the decision of the District Court.
- The Supreme Court granted the writ of certiorari to finally adjudicate upon the matter.
LAWS INVOLVED
- *US COPYRIGHT LAWS* § 102 (a) and (b) of the Copyrights Act, 1976 which states that “In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated or embodied in such work.”
- Section 101 of the Copyrights Act, 1976 provides that a copyright is “a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship”
ISSUES
- Whether the copyright in Rural’s directory protects the names, towns, and telephone numbers copied by Feist.
HELD
- The Supreme Court after looking at the Copyrights Act emphasized that the statute identifies three distinct elements and requires each to be met for a work to qualify as a copyrightable compilation:
- (1) the collection and assembly of pre-existing materials, facts, or data;
- (2) the selection, coordination, or arrangement of those materials, and
- (3) the creation, by virtue of the particular selection, coordination, or arrangement, as an “original” work of authorship. Quoting the case of Mill Music¸469 U.S., at 164, the Supreme Court states that the “this tripartite conjunctive structure is self-evident, and should be assumed to ‘accurately express the legislative purpose.’ ”
- In the field of Copyright law, facts are not copyrightable as they are a product of mere discovery but the compilation thereof in different arrangements would be copyrightable as it satisfies the originality requirement (“an original work of authorship”). Therefore, in determining whether a fact-based work in an original work of authorship, it must be tested on the manner in which the collected facts have been selected, coordinated and arranged. For every arrangement of facts to past the muster, it must be selected, coordinated and arranged “in such a way” as to render the work as a whole original.
- The raw data which Rural had certainly did not satisfy the originality requirement. Rural Inc. may have been the first to discover and report the names, towns and telephone numbers of tis subscribers, but this data does not “owe its origin” to Rural. Rather, these bits of information are un-copyrightable facts; they existed before Rural Inc. reported them and would have continued to exist if Rural Inc. had never published a telephonic directory.
- Also, Rural did not truly “select” to publish the names and telephone numbers of its subscribers; rather it was required to do so by the Kansas Corporation Commissions as part of its monopoly franchise. Accordingly, it can be presumed that the selection was dictated by state law, not by Rural.
- The names, towns and telephones numbers copied by Feist were not original to Rural and therefore were not protected by the copyright in Rural’s combined white and yellow pages directory. As a constitutional matter, copyright protects only those constituent elements of a work that possess more than a de minimis quantum of creativity. The alphabetic arrangement of subscriber’s information does not afford protection from copying as it utterly lacks originality. Therefore, Feist listings cannot constitute infringement.
- The decision of the Court of Appeals is Reversed.
- Court held that for a piece of work to get protection under copyrights law, the following conditions must be met –
- a) the collection and assembly of pre-existing materials, facts, or data;
- b) the selection, coordination, or arrangement of those materials, and
- c) the creation, by virtue of the particular selection, coordination, or arrangement, as an “original” work of authorship