Vance R. Koven wrote:
>
> My memory of this may be fuzzy, but my impression that ProCD was not
> very much about contract law at all, but about the application of Feist
> to the transfer of phone books to CDROM. Anything the court would have
> said about contract law there would have been dictum.
Not at all. One of the pivotal issues in ProCD was whether a shrinkwrap license that prohibited the copying of the (purely factual) database was uneforceable because preempted by copyright law. The district court so held; the Circuit reversed, holding that the shrinkwrap license in this case was an enforceable contract between the database creator and the purchaser, and that two parties can contract to give greater protection to certain materials than would normally be afforded under copyright law. The Circuit cited trade secret law and employee confidentiality agreements as examples of situations in which mere facts unprotected by copyright law could nevertheless be protected by contract.
Bob Cumbow
<cumbr[_at_]perkinscoie.com>
Received on Fri Feb 14 1997 - 18:25:53 GMT
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