What issues of law were decided in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service?

Answer 1

Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service,499 US 340 (1991)

Feist v. Rural was a case involving copyright law arising from Feist Publications' decision to copy the data in Rural Telephone Service's directory listings after Rural explicitly refused to license the information. The decision of the Court explicitly defined the standard of copyrightability as excluding the "sweat of the brow" or "industrial collection" doctrine that the publishing industry had relied on based on lower courts' interpretation of the Copyright Act of 1909.

Rural Telephone Service was a telephone cooperative that held a monopoly franchise on phone service in northwest Kansas. They were required by state law to create an annual directory of all customers and telephone numbers for which they provided service, and distribute it free of charge.

Feist Publications compiled into a larger database regional phone listings acquired from smaller, local telephone companies. They worked out licensing agreements with every coop except Rural Telephone Service, which refused to negotiate for use of their listings. Although Feist did not offer telephone services, they competed with Rural for Yellow Pages advertising sales, creating a monopoly incentive for Rural to refuse working with Feist.

Feist subsequently copied 7,700 entries from Rural's directory without the company's consent. They deleted the listings that fell outside their service area, and hired employees to verify the remaining 4,935 listings. Feist enhanced the product by adding street addresses to most listings, a feature Rural's phone book lacked.

Rural had seeded their phone listings with a number of phony customer names and numbers to detect copying and, despite Feist's efforts to check the source material, four fake listings slipped through and were published in Feist's directory. Rural subsequently filed civil suit against its competitor.

The basis of the suit was copyright infringement, under provisions that followed the English common law "sweat of the brow" (or "industrious collection") doctrine, a concept that allowed an "author" to claim copyright protection for databases and lists, such as telephone directories, that were produced through research effort. In order to protect such work, the copyright holder frequently inserted (or "seeded") false information that served as an identifier of his or her work product.

While Rural stipulated that facts were not copyrightable, they argued that compilations of facts were.

The Supreme Court, in a unanimous 9-0 decision, held that copyrightability was based on originality, not effort, and that the "author" could not claim rights to the information or facts narated, as determined in Harper & Row Publishing, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 US 539 (1985). Due to vague wording in the Copyright Act of 1909, some lower courts had erred in allowing the "sweat of the brow" doctrine to control, when the intent of the Constitution clearly contradicted those rulings.

Citing Congress' constitutional authority to enact copyright laws (Article I, § 8, cl. 8) to "secure for limited times to authors...the exclusive right to their respective writings," the Court held that both the Constitution and two precedent-setting 19th Century cases, The Trade-Mark Cases, 100 US 82 (1879), and Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 US 53 (1884), made it unmistakably clear that, in order to qualify for copyright protection, the work must original (not copied), and must possess at least a minimal degree of creativity.

The Court drew a distinction between an entity that discovers and records facts, and one who creates an original product from those facts. While copyright protection may adhere to compilations, the protection extends to the assembly, organization, and presentation of those facts (which must exercise originality beyond simple alphabetization) and to any other original component of the work, but not to the underlying facts. Information is considered part of the public domain, and is freely available to everyone in society.

Justice O'Connor, who wrote the Opinion of the Court, stated "The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.""

Further, supporting an argument present by Feist, Rural had not chosen to publish the directory, but had been required to do so by the Kansas Corporation Commission, because Rural held a monopoly franchise.

In conclusion, O'Connor quoted from the opinion of Baker v. Selden, 101 US 99, 105 (1880), "'great praise may be due to the plaintiffs for their industry and enterprise in publishing this paper, yet the law does not contemplate their being rewarded in this way.'"