Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1991

Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.

499 U.S. 340 | 111 S. Ct. 1282 | 113 L. Ed. 2d 358 | 1991 U.S. LEXIS 1856 | 91 Daily Journal DAR 3580 | 59 U.S.L.W. 4251 | 121 P.U.R.4th 1 | 91 Cal. Daily Op. Serv. 2217

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Takeaway

In short, this case rejects "sweat of the brow": copyright in a factual compilation protects only minimally creative selection or arrangement, never the facts themselves.

Background

Rural Telephone Service Company was a Kansas telephone utility required to publish an annual directory as a condition of its monopoly franchise. Its white pages listed each subscriber's name, town, and telephone number in alphabetical order. Feist Publications produced a broader, area-wide directory covering multiple telephone-service areas. Because it lacked independent access to subscriber data, Feist offered to license listings from the relevant local telephone companies. Rural alone refused.

Feist nonetheless used Rural's white pages as a source. It excluded listings outside its coverage area and investigated the remaining entries, often adding street addresses. Still, 1,309 listings in Feist's directory were identical to Rural's listings, including four fictitious entries Rural had planted to detect copying. Rural sued Feist for copyright infringement.

The District Court granted summary judgment for Rural, relying on lower-court authority treating telephone directories as copyrightable. The Tenth Circuit affirmed for substantially the District Court's reasons. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to decide whether Rural's copyright protected the names, towns, and telephone numbers that Feist copied.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether copyright protection in a factual compilation extends to the underlying facts collected by the compiler.

Holding

No. Facts are never copyrightable, and a compilation copyright protects only original expression in the compiler's selection, coordination, or arrangement of those facts.

Reasoning

The constitutional and statutory foundation of copyright is originality. A work must be independently created and possess at least a minimal degree of creativity. Facts fail this test because they are discovered rather than created: the person who first finds or reports a fact is not its author or originator.

A factual compilation may qualify for copyright because a compiler can make original choices about which facts to include and how to select, coordinate, or arrange them. But the resulting copyright is necessarily thin. It protects those original choices, not the underlying facts, which remain in the public domain for later authors to use.

The Court rejected the older "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" doctrine, under which copyright rewarded the labor spent gathering facts and effectively barred competitors from using the gathered information. That approach improperly creates a monopoly over public-domain facts and conflicts with the constitutional purpose of copyright, which protects original expression while allowing others to build on facts and ideas.

The 1976 Copyright Act confirms this rule. Section 102(a) requires an original work of authorship; § 102(b) denies copyright protection to ideas, discoveries, and facts; § 101 defines a copyrightable compilation as one whose selection, coordination, or arrangement makes the work original; and § 103(b) limits a compilation copyright to the compiler's original contributions rather than the preexisting material.

Issue #2

Whether Rural's alphabetical white-pages listings possessed sufficient originality for Feist's copying of names, towns, and telephone numbers to constitute infringement.

Holding

No. Rural's selection and alphabetical arrangement of basic subscriber information lacked the minimal creativity required for copyright protection, so Feist did not copy protected material.

Reasoning

Copyright infringement requires both ownership of a valid copyright and copying of constituent elements that are original to the copyright owner. Rural's directory as a whole could have a valid copyright because it contained original foreword text and material in its yellow pages, but that did not establish copyright protection for every component of the directory.

The names, towns, and telephone numbers were uncopyrightable facts. Rural did not create those data; they existed independently of Rural's directory. Its role in collecting and publishing them did not transform them into original expression.

Rural's selection was wholly routine. It listed the most basic identifying information for every person who applied for telephone service. That practice involved no creative choice, and it may also have been compelled by Kansas regulation as a condition of Rural's monopoly franchise.

Rural's arrangement was likewise unoriginal. Alphabetizing subscribers by surname is an obvious, customary, and practically inevitable method for organizing a telephone directory. Although originality requires only a modest creative spark, a mechanical alphabetical listing does not meet even that low threshold.

Because Rural's white pages contained no protectable original selection or arrangement, Feist's copying of the factual listings was not infringement. Copyright rewards originality rather than the effort or expense involved in compiling useful information.

Concurrences

Justice Blackmun

Reasoning

Justice Blackmun concurred only in the judgment. He did not provide a separate written opinion explaining a different rationale.