Re: West loses major copyright decision

John Lederer <johnl[_at_]ibm.net> wrote:
>
> The district court for the SDNY has just held that outside of its
> headnotes West has no copyrightable interest in its federal reporters.

     I am very pleased to see that Judge John S. Martin, Jr. remained unpersuaded by West's lawyers' flimsy arguments.

     However, there is one thing in the transcript at http://www.hyperlaw.com/trialtr.htm (page 143, lines 8 and 9) that disturbs me, perhaps because I do not understand the interplay between the license and copyright.

     Imagine this scenario: I purchase a CD-ROM from Hyperlaw, West, or any other law publisher. In the CD-ROM are many hundreds of federal judicial decisions. Also, it comes with the license (such as a shrinkwrap license) which states that I can not copy all decisions at one time. Even though the decisions are not copyrightable, can the license restrain me from, say, copying all decisions to web pages and make them available to the Internet World for free?

     If the answer is or seems to be yes, such kind of license will only trivialize the impact of Judge Martin, Jr.'s ruling on the status of the federal judicial decisions. We are back to the same old problem - the access to the federal judicial decisions in the non-federal sources is limited, this time, by license - when the CD-ROM or electronic storage's popularity surpasses the paper storage.

     While I was writing this post, I read David A. Rice's post on UCC Article 2B. I could not find Prof. Charles McManis' amendment at www.softwareindustry.org's site. But, suppose that the amendment will invalidate the above license. Then, we do not have to worry a bit. (Can anyone tell me whether the amendment is available on the Internet and if so, where is it?)

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> Received on Wed May 28 1997 - 22:38:19 GMT