On Wed, 12 Feb 1997, "David F. Crosby" <dcrosby[_at_]usa1.com> wrote:
>
> I do not recall the statute mentioning anything about creativity -
> did it come from the legislative history?
For an interesting article on creativity, Feist, and the legislative history of the 1976 Act, see Russ VerSteeg, Sparks in the Tinderbox: Feist, "Creativity," and the Legislative History of the 1976 Copyright Act, 56 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 549 (1995).
It is important to emphasize that Feist found the requirement of creativity to be *constitutionally* mandated and went back to early cases to demonstrate this:
"In Burrow-Giles, the Court distilled the same requirement from the Constitution's use of the word 'authors.' The Court defined 'author,' in a constitutional sense, to mean 'he to whom anything owes its origin; originator; maker.' As in The Trade-Mark Cases, the Court emphasized the creative component of originality. It described copyright as being limited to 'original intellectual conceptions of the author,' and stressed the importance of requiring an author who accuses another of infringement to prove 'the existence of those facts of originality, of intellectual production, of thought, and conception.'
Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone, 499 U.S. 340 (1991) (citations omitted).
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