Re: West loses major copyright decision

On Wednesday, May 28, 1997, Joseph P. Riolo <riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> wrote:
>
> 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?)

What I find intriguing in these discussions is that no-one seems to be giving any thought to whether commercial publishers will continue with services that, effectively, can be ripped off by competitors, who have invested absolutely nothing. Leaving aside any desire to beat up on West, any your interests really advanced if the larger law publishers decide to abandon what are obviously, for practitioners and academics, key areas of publishing?

Andrew Martin
Executive Director
Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency
6 Adelaide Street East #900
Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6
Canada

tel: (416) 868-1620 x226
fax: (416) 868-1613

e-mail: amartin[_at_]cancopy.com Received on Thu May 29 1997 - 15:01:40 GMT