Re: Comment on Feist

David Crosby wrote (responding to comments on Feist made, I think, by Bob Stock):
> ... the telephone listing represented combination of factual and
> fictional elements. So what you are saying is that there is no
> protection for factual information, no matter how it is organized
> and that the work includes a combination of factual and fictional
> elements, the author loses the rights to fictional elements because
> of the combination. I have trouble reconciling this position with
> the position that maps are copyrightable. ... from Feist it follows
> that the more visually accurate a map is (and less creative in the
> depiction), the less protectable it is.

It is true that there is no protection for factual information, no matter how it is organized. There is, however, protection for the organization itself. That is the whole impact of Feist: "selection and arrangement" may be sufficiently original to merit protection even where the underlying facts themselves are not protectable. (As it turned out, the selection and arrangement in Feist, mere alphabetization, was not sufficiently original to be protectable; but a modest level of originality of presentation, such as that found in some "Yellow Page" directories, may be sufficient to warrant protection.) When we copyright a map we are not reserving an exclusive right to the underlying facts themselves, but rather to our particular form of expression of those facts---the choice of colors, symbols and artistic design used to convey those facts, as well as the selection of which facts to include and which not.

Bob Cumbow
<cumbr[_at_]perkinscoie.com> Received on Fri Feb 14 1997 - 18:18:03 GMT