On 8/17/98, Terry Carroll <carroll[_at_]tjc.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 16 Aug 1998, Bob Stock <bstock[_at_]ucla.edu> wrote:
> >
> > On 8/14/98, Dan L. Burk <burkdanl[_at_]shu.edu> wrote:
> > >
> > > There tends to be more original material in most college textbooks.
> > > Casebooks are collections of cases, usually heavily edited and
> > > annotated. Many, if not all, cases will be public domain material.
> > > So casebook authors are more editors -- the originality in the
> > > casebook will be in selection and arrangement of the compilation.
> >
> > The annotations would also be copyrightable.
>
> I would also argue that, in most cases, the choices of what to leave in
> and take out of a particular case is covered by copyright as well.
I thought of this as well, but it seems to me that it causes a lot of problems to come to this conclusion. Usually, casebook authors will include cases that are pertinent to what they are teaching. Then, depending on why they pick a particular case, they will then eliminate those parts of the case that are irrelevant (or perhaps redundant) to the point they are trying to make. Assuming you have another casebook and author on the same subject, there will no doubt be some overlap in case selection, and I would argue that there is also going to be considerable overlap in which portions of the opinion to keep and which to edit out. In other words, you may have only a few ways to be creative in this process, at least in some instances, and this would tend to reduce the probability of making that particular component of the casebook copyrightable.
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