Re: West loses major copyright decision

From: <ArborLaw[_at_]aol.com>
Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 16:13:14 -0400 (EDT)

On 5/29/97, Joseph Riolo <riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> wrote:
>
> 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 the CD-ROM is a collection and therefore a statutory collective work under the Copyright Act, it is a collection of public domain material analogous to Feist. Assuming it is complete (the set of all X) and not an edition (greatest hits of X) I think Feist applies, at least by analogy (collection of public domain material instead of facts, where collection is arranged with minimal originality).

Carol Shepherd
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==--====-==-=-=-==--=--====--=-=-=-====---===-=-=-====---===---= Received on Thu May 29 1997 - 20:13:24 GMT