From Feist v. Rural

Posted by Daniel Turner on February 06th 2010 to Administrative

Just as I was remarking to someone that SCOTUS decisions were so much easier to read than most legal papers, I run across this: “Section 3 was similarly ambiguous. It stated that the copyright in a work protected only “the copyrightable component parts of the work.””

That does seem rather circular, doesn’t it? It would be a stretch for copyright law to cover the non-copyrightable portions of a work.

* 1 Comment

One Response to “From Feist v. Rural”

  1. jhemerly
    February 7th, 2010 | 3:50 pm

    It’s not. It means that just because a work contains some copyrightable components that does not automatically extend copyright to the work as a whole. So, in the Feist white pages, the foreward and other original copy created by Rural’s copywriters is copyrightable, but the facts and arrangement are not, and neither is the work as a whole.