Case Digest

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

499 U.S. 340

Doctrine:

The Copyright Act of 1976 and its predecessor, the Copyright Act of 1909, leave
no doubt that originality is the touchstone of copyright protection in directories
and other fact-based works. The 1976 Act explains that copyright extends to
"original works of authorship," and that there can be no copyright in facts. Facts
cannot be subject to copyright laws; otherwise there would be no spreading of
information or learning. Subjecting facts to copyright laws would mean that any
time a person used a fact found in a book, be it in a school paper, newspaper, or
another book, that person would be guilty of piracy.

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 Plaintiff’s consent. Rural sued for copyright
infringement.

Issue.
Are the names, addresses, and phone numbers in a telephone directory able to
be copyrighted?

Held:

No. 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.

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.