1 Copyright Basics
Carla Myers
Constitutional and Statutory Law
Constitutional and Statutory Law
U.S. Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 8. The Congress shall have Power * * * To 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.
U.S. Copyright Law, 17 U.S.C. §§101 et seq
Case Law
The following three texts are syllabi of opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). Syllabi are prepared by the Reporter of Decisions of the SCOTUS and proceed the Court’s opinion. Syllabi are not an official part of the Court’s opinions; rather, they provide a summary of the facts of the case and the Court’s decision. In this chapter as several cases are used to outline key concepts of U.S. copyright law syllabi are used rather than the text of the opinions themselves. Readers are directed to the Oyez (pronounced OH-yay) web site, “a free law project from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII), Justia, and Chicago-Kent College of Law. . . devoted to making the Supreme Court of the United States accessible to everyone” (About Oyez, n.d.), for the full text of each opinion and a recording of the oral arguments. Readers are strongly encouraged to engage with both.
Case 1: Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc.
Feist Pubs., Inc. v. Rural Tel. Svc. Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
Syllabus
Respondent Rural Telephone Service Company is a certified public utility providing telephone service to several communities in Kansas. Pursuant to state regulation, Rural publishes a typical telephone directory, consisting of white pages and yellow pages. It obtains data for the directory from subscribers, who must provide their names and addresses to obtain telephone service. Petitioner Feist Publications, Inc., is a publishing company that specializes in area-wide telephone directories covering a much larger geographic range than directories such as Rural’s. When Rural refused to license its white pages listings to Feist for a directory covering 11 different telephone service areas, Feist extracted the listings it needed from Rural’s directory without Rural’s consent. Although Feist altered many of Rural’s listings, several were identical to listings in Rural’s white pages. The District Court granted summary judgment to Rural in its copyright infringement suit, holding that telephone directories are copyrightable. The Court of Appeals affirmed.
Held: Rural’s white pages are not entitled to copyright, and therefore Feist’s use of them does not constitute infringement. Pp. 499 U. S. 344-364.
(a) Article I, § 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable. Although a compilation of