Re: Notice on ads in collective works

From: Bob Stock <bstock[_at_]ucla.edu>
Date: Sat, 07 Mar 1998 08:17:15 -0800

On 3/6/98, John Noble <jnoble[_at_]dgsys.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/5/98, Bob Stock <bstock[_at_]ucla.edu> wrote:
> >
> > "Treating the yellow pages advertising as creations that are
> > something more than compilations of facts, we hold that under
> > 17 U.S.C. Sec. 404(a), the existence of a copyright notice on
> > plaintiff's directory is insufficient to prohibit the copying of
> > an advertisement from that directory, absent a copyright notice
> > specific to the advertisement itself."
> >
> > Transwestern Publishing Co. v. Multimedia Marketing Associates, Inc.,
> > 1998 U.S. App. LEXIS 229, *23 (10th Cir. 1998).
>
> Read it carefully. It says that the notice is insufficient to
> prohibit copying "from that directory". And later in the same
> paragraph: "Because there is no separate copyright on the ads allegedly
> copied, plaintiff cannot use this provision _to gain protection for the
> third party ads_ ...." I think the court is rejecting the claim of
> infringement _of the directory_ based on the alleged duplication of ads
> collected in the directory, everything else having been filtered out as
> uncopyrightable. Indeed, your point -- that the ads are protected by
> copyright without a printed notice -- is so elementary that this is the
> only reasonable interpretation of what the court is doing -- short of
> sheer ignorance.

Yes, well, it wouldn't be the first time. Here is my logical sequence of statements:

1. Copyright notice is not required for the ads.
2. If they are otherwise copyrightable, they have a copyright.
3. Copying them from the directory by anyone other than the copyright owner or a licensee would be a violation of the owner's copyright.
4. The court's statement that lack of notice permits ("insufficient to prohibit") such copying from the directory or from anywhere else is wrong.

Now maybe the court meant something else, and maybe this is an instance where the plain language of the opinion (like the plain language of a statute) couldn't possibly mean what it says, so we're gonna find that it means something other than what it says, but I'll leave that to courts interpreting statutes and critics interpreting movies.

Or maybe you and I just disagree on the meaning of the plain language. Either way, we've probably thrashed it as much as we can. :-) And on something that wasn't even necessary to the result, yet.

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Bob Stock <bstock[_at_]ucla.edu>
UCLA School of Law '98
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/1206/

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Received on Sat Mar 07 1998 - 16:16:28 GMT