Copyright in compilation

Copyright in compilation is a facet of copyright law that may provide copyright protection to a compilation (or collection) of material, irrespective of copyright in the underlying material.

In the copyright law in the United States, such copyright may exist when the materials in the compilation (or "collective work") are selected, coordinated, or arranged creatively such that a new work is produced. Copyright does not exist when content is compiled without creativity, such as in the production of a telephone directory. In the case of compilation copyright, the compiler does not receive copyright in the underlying material, but only in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of that material.

In the European Union, copyright in compilation due to the creativity of selection and arrangement is one facet of the Database Directive of 1996, which also protects databases from extraction of substantial content that represents significant work by the compiler.

A compilation may include any combination of public domain material or copyrighted material, owned by the compiler or others. If a compilation utilizes material under copyright by someone else, compilation protection does not grant the compiler rights to that material or permission to use it without license, and it does not give the compiler the right to prevent others from reusing the individual elements in the compilation. Rather, it exists independently of any copyright protection that may apply to the material used in the compilation itself.

Confusion sometimes occurs when the copyright status of the elements is conflated with the copyright status of the compilation. For instance, copyright on a filmed musical may lapse, but public display of the film without license may remain a copyright infringement if the songs performed therein are still protected by copyright.

Under the U.S. law, which protects the human creativity expressed in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the material, the copyright office gives the following examples of compilations in which copyright might exist, as each represents compilations that reflect human creativity in preparation:

A critical case to the application of copyright in compilation in U.S. law is Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), in which the Supreme Court clarified the role of creativity in protection. In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.

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Wikipedia