Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service
| Feist v. Rural | |
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| Argued January 9, 1991 Decided March 27, 1991 |
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| Full case name | Feist Publications, Incorporated v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Incorporated |
| Citations | 499 U.S. 340 (more)
111 S. Ct. 1282; 113 L. Ed. 2d 358; 1991 U.S. LEXIS 1856; 59 U.S.L.W. 4251; 18 U.S.P.Q.2D (BNA) 1275; Copy. L. Rep. (CCH) P26,702; 68 Rad. Reg. 2d (P & F) 1513; 18 Media L. Rep. 1889; 121 P.U.R.4th 1; 91 Cal. Daily Op. Service 2217; 91 Daily Journal DAR 3580
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| Prior history | Summary judgment for plaintiff, 663 F. Supp. 214 (D. Kan. 1987); affirmed, 916 F.2d 718 (10th Cir. 1990); affirmed, full opinion at 1990 U.S. App. LEXIS 25881 (10th Cir. 1990); cert. granted, 498 U.S. 808 (1990) |
| Holding | |
| The white pages of a telephone book did not satisfy the minimum originality required by the Constitution to be eligible for copyright protection, and effort and expenditure of resources are not protected by copyright. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed. | |
| Court membership | |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | O'Connor, joined by Rehnquist, White, Marshall, Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter |
| Concurrence | Blackmun |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. Art. I § 8 | |
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. 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.
Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. is a telephone cooperative providing services for areas in northwest Kansas, with headquarters in the small town of Lenora, in Norton County. The company was under a statutory obligation to compile a phone directory of all their customers free of charge as a condition of their monopoly franchise.
Feist Publications, Inc. specialized in compiling telephone directories from larger geographic areas than Rural from other areas of Kansas. They had licensed the directory of 11 other local directories, with Rural being the only hold-out in the region. Despite Rural's denial of a license to Feist, Feist copied some 4000 entries from Rural's directory. Because Rural had placed a small number of phony entries to detect copying, Feist was caught.
Prior to this case, the substance of copyright in United States law followed the sweat of the brow doctrine, which gave copyright to anyone who invested significant amount of time and energy into their work. At trial and appeal level the courts followed this doctrine, siding with Rural.
The ruling of the court was written by Justice O'Connor. It examined the purpose of copyright and explained the standard of copyrightability as based on originality.
The case centered on two well-established principles in United States copyright law: That facts are not copyrightable, but that compilations of facts can be.
"There is an undeniable tension between these two propositions," Justice O'Connor wrote in her decision. "Many compilations consist of nothing but raw data -- i.e. wholly factual information not accompanied by any original expression. On what basis may one claim a copyright upon such work? Common sense tells us that 100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place. … The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable: The sine qua non of copyright is originality."
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