At 03:33 PM 2/27/95 -0500, James Love wrote:
>
>On Tue, 14 Feb 1995, J Dale Debber wrote:
>> Lets get real and recognize that the work a person or company does for
>> profit is and should remain their property. West Publishing has a right
>> to keep their work their own.
>
> West makes a number of value added contributions to case law that are
>clearly protected by copyright, such as the West key system. [But w]hen
>West acts as the "publisher" of legal opinions, do the minor corrections,
>many telephoned or mailed to West by judges or parties in cases, allow
>West to copyright the published text of the opinions. [?]
In fact, West does much more than make some "minor corrections." As Mr. Love acknowledges, there are "a number of value added contributions," such as adding parallel and alternative citations, key numbers, and the like. In any event, the copyright is in the selection, coordination and arrangement of the case reports in the compilation, not in the text of the judges' opinions.
> . . . Second, can West copyright the page numbers where cases appear on
>its bound volumes (the so called "interior" page numbers)? These are the
>value added things that West is seeking to protect.
This misstates the nature of the copyright. The exact nature of the copyright was stated clearly by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1985. The Court wrote:
"[T]he copyright we recognize here is in West's arrangement, not in its numbering system; MDC's use of West's page numbers is problematic because it infringes West's copyrighted arrangement, not because the numbers themselves are copyrighted."
799 F.2d 1219, 1228. The specific use involved would have copied every single interior page number, in effect replicating the entire arrangement.
Mr. Love further wrote:
>The page number problem is particularly important, because as the only
>comprehensive publisher of case law over the past century, these are the
>citations which are used in a huge body of judicial opinions and law
>review articles.
While it's probably flattering to call someone a "comprehensive" publisher, West's case reporters aren't all-inclusive. The U.S. district courts, for example, decide something like 700,000 cases a year; but only about 1% of these ever get reported in a West case reporter.
Comprehensive or not, is there a "problem"? I might see a "problem" if these citations could NOT be used by judges in their opinions or by scholars in their law review articles. But the admission that the citations ARE freely used there, and the fact that anyone can quote what the judges write, looks to me like proof that there's NOT a problem.
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