re: Are References and Titles Facts?

Someone wrote that he saw "no problem" with certain citations to magazines, books, etc. That conclusion seems sound. However, the reply also stated that:

> the eighth circuit . . . said West did have a copyright in the page
> numbers. . . . Why Lexis caved and didn't take it to the Supreme
> Court I do not know. . . .

Actually, Mead *did* ask the Supreme Court to take the case for review, and the Supreme Court declined to hear it.

Also, the Eighth Circuit didn't hold that West had "a copyright in the page numbers" (or in citations). The court wrote that "the 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."

Consider concordances. A concordance could list every word in a work alphabetically, and for each word state where it occurred: i.e., "Ishmael: 3, 274, 1,873," etc. along with "Call: 1, 47," etc. and "me: 2, 102, 128," etc. So far, fine. Now add software that uses that concordance to display words 1000 through 2000 (or any other range a user chooses) and voila -- a copy of "Moby Dick," not just a concordance.

Michael Trittipo
Schatz Paquin Lockridge Grindal & Holstein P.L.L.P. splgh[_at_]primenet.com
One of our clients is West Publishing. Received on Thu Feb 15 1996 - 03:51:12 GMT