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Can FAQs Be Copyrighted?
scubacuda writes: "Are FAQs copywritable? Judge Barbara B. Crabb, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, in the case Mist-On Systems, Inc. v. Gilley's European Tan Spa, didn't think so."
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They simply said that you can't copyright the idea of an FAQ or the format of an FAQ, or a list of obvious questions.
If the FAQ had been swiped, with answers copied verbatim, it would have been a different ruling. The court ruled the competitor's FAQ was sufficiently different to not be an infringement, or so the article you point at said.
So this is much ado over nothing.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
According to the report, most of the reason for the decision was to do with the fact that there wasn't evidence of wholesale copying. There's only one paragraph in the report suggesting that FAQs in general can't be copyrighted, and my gut instinct says that something couldn't *not* be copyrighted merely because it's a FAQ. It would be the context and content of the FAQ that would determine whether it could be copyrighted.
For some reason this site won't let you read the article if you don't accept cookies.
"For every frequently asked question (FAQ) there is an answer. And with respect to the question whether FAQs posted on Web sites are deserving of copyright protection, Judge Barbara B. Crabb, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, in the case Mist-On Systems, Inc. v. Gilley's European Tan Spa, on May 2 answered "no." Thus, it appears that lawsuits designed to snuff out the competition by seeking to attack Web content such as FAQs may fail, and if anything, may embolden competitors.
THE ALLEGATIONS
Plaintiff Mist-On Systems alleged that defendant Gilley's European Tan Spa infringed on its exclusive rights under the Copyright Act by preparing and displaying on its Web page a page that mirrored the FAQ page on Mist-On's Web site. Mist-On sought monetary and injunctive relief from Gilley's based on the "irreparable harm" it had suffered.
THE COMPETING WEB SITES
Mist-On's Web page, entitled "Mist-On Tanning Frequently Asked Questions," consisted of a single page of 19 questions about the Mist-On Tanning process and provided other related hints.
Gilley's Web page, entitled Gilley's European Tan Spa "FAQ's Sunless Express Spray Spa," comprised three pages of operating instructions and 16 questions about the Sunless Express Spray Spa.
According to the court, "when the two works are compared side-by-side, similarities are evident." That is because "both web pages utilize the Frequently Asked Questions format," "both web pages use common words to begin each question, such as 'how,' 'can,' 'is,' 'what,' and 'will,'" and because "both web pages focus on a spray-on form of sunless tanning" and "provide similar information."
THE COURT'S RULING
Notwithstanding the foregoing similarities, the court held that "these superficial similarities fall short of proving copying" because they are not the equivalent of copying constituent elements of the work that are original. According to the court and prior case law, regardless of the "original authorship" contained in a work, "the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking."
Taking it a step further, the court held that "a business cannot copyright a Frequently Asked Questions page" or the words or phrases that comprise such a page because "the format of a Frequently Asked Questions page is a common idea in our society." Indeed, "the elements of a Frequently Asked Questions page (a list of questions beginning with common words) are stereotypical."
Ultimately, Mist-On agreed that it could not copyright the idea of a FAQ page. However, Mist-On argued that because the Gilley's FAQ page was so similar to the Mist-On FAQ page that there must be some copyright infringement.
The court swatted away this argument by noting the differences between the two Web pages, such as the fact that "the sequence, the wording and the number of the questions are different from each other," "five of defendants' questions are entirely unique to their page," "seven of plaintiff's questions are entirely unique to its page," and "the layout of the web page[s] is different." Moreover, "there is no truth to plaintiff's assertion that many of defendants' questions and answers are 'nearly identical' to plaintiff's."
Accordingly, the court granted summary judgment without the need for a trial in favor of defendant Gilley's.
LESSONS LEARNED
Care must be taken in taking legal steps to deal with business competition. Plainly, this particular lawsuit did not help Mist-On in its efforts to deal with competitor Gilley's. Moreover, bad facts can make bad law. Here, the decision to assert copyright infringement for Internet content such as an FAQ page might not have been wise, especially when there truly are distinctions between the Web pages at issue."
Well, the questions are frequently asked, so no-one really has claim of copyright on the question. The answers should be available for copyrighting, though.
/me != lawyer).
Really all the judge found was that the defendant was not guilty of plagiarism (however,
I'd love to hear their argument on how it caused them "irreparable harm". Ha!
Per the article:
(and this is a better link too!)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Care to release information about the weaknesses of an insecure networking scheme a company refuses to address, details on how your favorite video game console functions, or the inner workings of a local cult? Make it into a FAQ!
;^)
Ryan Fenton
P.S. Yes, I realize this ain't the way it would really be accepted legally - but one can dream.
>Are FAQs copywritable? Sure they are. Just use the "cp" command or try dragging the icon into another folder. If you still have trouble, you need to check your file permissions. Oh, "copyrightable."
In any case, a FAQ is something someone has written, and all forms of creation are (well, should be) subject to copyright.
But the case dealt with is this:
(read more to find out)This decision does not say that FAQs are not subject to copyright though, but that there was no copyright infringement:
So the title of the article is misleading, the court just ruled that there was no copyright infringement because the 2 FAQs were different...
Let's move on... But I think the editors should have taken the time to read the article
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
READ THE DAMN ARTICLE BEFORE YOU POST IT ON THE MAIN PAGE!
This court case is so banal it doesn't even deserve mention. The plaintiff was suing the defendant on the grounds that it basically ripped off the idea of having a FAQ at all, which is about as asinine as having one publisher sue another for putting a synopsis on the back of a book. It wasn't even over whether one FAQ was a copy of the other - they didn't cover the same questions or use the same answers to those questions that were the same.
What's next, Slashdot posting an article about a court ruling that it is indeed legal for everyone to write books about how to use computer software without paying royalties to O'Rielly?
Even though others have clarified the ruling, I think it's worth noting (again?) that the judge did NOT think FAQs were not "copyrightable." In fact, the copy right of any work is automatically bestowed upon the author, but there is a formal procedure as well for registering a copyright.
The judge ruled that there was no copyright infringement. This ruling does not, in any way, imply that FAQs do not deserve copyright protection. It does, however, set the bar reasonably high for proving copyright infringement for a FAQ-style document.
This is a Good Thing. FAQs on vendors'/retailers sites will often have similar information. Think of the thousands of companies that install windows, or who sell nutritional products or cleaning products or pretty much anything manufactured by someone else. Two competitors could reasonably come up with very similar FAQs about that product category and its use, completely independent of each other.
The good news here is that the Court ruled in a reasonable manner, which we might hope will continue when the CBDTPA hits it in a few years...
someone stole my sig!He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
FAQs are commonplace - they've been around for at least a decade, and it'd be pretty damn hard to get a copyright for the idea of something that has probably been around since before you got plugged into the Internet.
Much better to write an OAQ (Often Asked Questions) document, since nobody's done that before. Then you can get your lousy copyright.
According to the court and prior case law, regardless of the "original authorship" contained in a work, "the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking."
FAQ's benefit everyone. They're collections of information, often resulting from many users' experiences over time, and they can be an extremely valuable resource. Although the chap who gathers the information together and presents it might well feel a bit miffed if you copied his FAQ and its style exactly without his permission, trying to prevent someone from distributing a FAQ helps no one.
As has been mentioned once or twice on Slashdot, copyright protection is supposed to benefit the public, not particular individuals.
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
The submitter of the story obviously linked to the wrong article.
The court says that the idea of an FAQ is not copyrightable (good thing), that a list of common questions relating to a certain subject is not copyrightable (good thing), and that in this particular case, the answers where so different that they weren't infringing (we haven't got the lists for side-by-side comparison, so this remains unclear, but there sin't something fishy about it in itself).
To me, it seems that the court made a reasonable decision. In particular, it did not rule that FAQs (which usually include the answers) are never protected by copyright.
Great! So how long before we discover FAQ's format have actually been granted a Patent by the USPO to some lucky individual out there ;)
You know, the /. crowd houses an alarming number of alarmists. I mean, it's good and all that people are ever-vigilant, yadda yadda, but areound here alert is raised just to be called off fully half the time.
If the editors edited instead of simply relaying common memes, maybe this problem would go away. At least a little bit.
± 29 dB
... when the courts made a reasonable and fair judgement. Next people will be saying that M$ is not always wrong...
Perhaps we can find the answer to that one in the Copywriting FAQ?
-- Free speech is only free if your time is worth nothing.
I don't know what the hell Mist-On was thinking except for trying to eliminate competition. These FAQ's are hardly anything alike.
http://www.mist-on.com/faq.htm
http://www.gilleystanspa.com/content/sunless.htm#
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
... is that you cannot protect an extrinsic convention (in this case a Question/Answer format). This is in contrast with other interpretations such as databases where the facts may be public (e.g. sports scores) but they've ruled that schemas and intrinsic data structures can be protected. This is a ruling that follows common sense as the parties indepedently constructed their FAQs and it would be unconciousable to extinguish one or the other.
... if it appears in an open forum then perhaps that establishes prior art which cannot be claimed as proprietary technology.
FAQs are a common industry custom, and much like man-pages follow a certain format, is based on expectations of that that information is intended to achieve. After all, similar intentions for a well-defined domain usually result in similar solutions. In this case attempting to use one legal concept (exclusive right to duplicate original copy) to achieve anti-competitive outcomes was rejected. There res decidendi (or question in conflict) was not relevant to copyright.
I hope some of the principles from this case can be moved over to the software patent domain. The reversal of historical application of patents as defensive shield towards modern offensive tactics (business process patent), is creating outcomes contrary to the original intent. When companies prepared to use new technology are esstoped from deployment by pure IP hurdles (cough*RamBus*cough) or other nuisance patents (cough*oneClick*cough), then perhaps it is worthwhile reconsidering redefining the bar to innovation.
Perhaps OpenSource could then be described as a defensive legal tactic
LL
that getting a fake tan was so complicated.
Now I know how Wonko the sane felt
Get the EULA T-shirt
This seems like it would fall under Feist v Rural Telephone Company, the "facts and 'sweat of the brow' cannot be copyrighted" ruling. In that, they found a phonebook was not copyrightable, as the information was not original and publically available. A FAQ is similar; "writing" one consists of copy and paste, and by that ruling can't be considered an original work.
t . tml
http://www.bitlaw.com/source/cases/copyright/feis
Link to Mist-on's FAQ on google cache.
And find here the alleged copy, Gilley's FAQ on google.
What do you think? To me, the only thing they have in common is the question marks, and that's not copyright infrigement.
Sure a FAQ can be copyrighted, its contents that is. If you build a FAQ with answers from copyright material, like citations from books, blueprints of a car, tc. this wil be copyrighted.
Even the FAQ presentation can be protected, as intelectual creation.
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
Somebody tried to sue a competitor for copyright infringement and lost. The court ruled that the material was sufficiently different that there was no infringement. Zzzzzzzz.
Coming up next: Boy Falls in Lake, Climbs Out Wet.
a FAQ on someone like Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton, or GWB, etc would vary greatly depending on the viewpoint of the author. With points for style, this would certainly make it copyrightable.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If the content of the FAQ is not soomething like "What causes a sunburn?"
From the article: "...the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking."
So if you right a FAQ about something general like 10 FAQ's about tanning, then of course the content isn't copyright protected, unless of course, you have unique information about some factor of tanning.
That's not to say that if your FAQ's are about a specific application or process that you've developed (which a lot of FAQ's are built to answer) that your FAQ would not be copyright protected.
The headline Are FAQs copywritable? is totally dependant upon the content of the FAQ, not the fact that it is an FAQ.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Would it have killed the guy to give a proper cite? I can't seem to find the actual case to read what it said.
Jeebus, it's "copyright".
Seriously, a copywriter and a copyrighter have two completely different jobs.
Can you write copy for a FAQ? I suppose. Can you copyright a FAQ? I haven't the foggiest.
Bitch and moan all you want, this isn't little grammar issue I'm pointing out. A misused word, in this case, completely changes the meaning of the question.
At least the editors got this one right in the title.
I think that the real cause for alarm in all this is that there are people out there that *NEED* a frequently-asked questions list for a tanning spray.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
I hate to read articles about legal issues on Slashdot, because they often show no understanding of the issues at all. Really, you should stick to technical and pop cultural issues.
As the parent correctly states, the court did not say FAQs are not copyrightable, it said there was no copyright infringment in this case. Here is the gist of the article (pasted):
According to the court, "when the two works are compared side-by-side, similarities are evident." That is because "both web pages utilize the Frequently Asked Questions format," "both web pages use common words to begin each question, such as 'how,' 'can,' 'is,' 'what,' and 'will,'" and because "both web pages focus on a spray-on form of sunless tanning" and "provide similar information."
Notwithstanding the foregoing similarities, the court held that "these superficial similarities fall short of proving copying" because they are not the equivalent of copying constituent elements of the work that are original. According to the court and prior case law, regardless of the "original authorship" contained in a work, "the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking."
- Have a picture
They said you can't copyright the IDEA of an FAQ.
The Judge decided that the 2 faq's in question were NOT copies, that they were only similar (both being faqs on the same obscure subject)
You most certainly CAN exert copyright if someone copies your work verbatim, whether it's an faq or not.
I'll check my grammar next time. :)
There's nothing unclear about that whatsoever.
I didn't think so either; that's why I submitted the article!
If you ask me, the court was trying to flex its muscles and make a decision that would have a long lasting effect on the internet.
Agreed. I posted it because it's often the most *insignificant* rulings that subsequent lawyers draw on to later decisions.
Not that I'm a lawyer, but this seems to contradict all forms of copyright law I've ever read about.
Agreed here too. A lot seems very counterintuitive to how one might ordinarily interpret copyright law.
They did not over step their bounds. If you think about it what the decided is really common sense. What is a FAQ? A FAQ is a a list of Frequently Asked Questions. What does Frequently mean? It means a lot or many. This mean that a FAQ is a list of questions that gets asked many times repeated in some form or another.
Well, someone might put together the FAQ document, but it not wholly their work. The questions in some part come from the people asking the questions. When was the last time you saw a FAQ with the list of peope asking the questions (thus giving credit to the author of the question(s))? I haven't. Probably, to give credit where it is due, only the first few authors would have to be listed, and the rest might be represented by et. al. (or something like that). I not 100% sure on that point.
The main item is that the person, persons, or company that puts together the FAQ document did not entirely author the document themselves. SO why should they be able to get the copyright when they are not giving credit to everyone who deserves credit (which is required for books, magazines, etc.).
FAQ documents should not be copyrighted.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
From http://www.lapl.org/central/guides/copyrights.html , What cannot be copyrighted?
"Titles, names, slogans and phrases cannot be copyrighted. Other items that cannot be protected by copyrights are: ideas, methods, procedures and common knowledge such as a calendar. If the work has not been fixed in a tangible form, it cannot be copyrighted."
Emphasis on 'methods, procedures and common knowledge'. The key words in a FAQ are 'frequently asked', by humans, to humans. FAQs tell us how to do something, provide a method for understanding, or give us specific procedures. The same questions are going to have the same answers, even if written slightly different, and thus should not be copyrightable.
Here an interpretation from http://questy.com/tech/inet6.htm
"A fact cannot be copyrighted. A list of facts cannot be copyrighted. However, when I write a document that lists the facts, but also includes my opinions or add original content in addition to the facts, I can copyright that document."
Imagine being able to copyright that a corn seed should be planted at 2inches then watered.
Now if I were to write 'Unique Questions that Only I have the Answer To', maybe I could do something with that.
The article says that, but further reading of the material later in the article contradicts it.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The generalization cannot be protected for the obvious reasons stated in the article, but the copyright can be supported if there is a far more obvious word for word copying.
For instance, if an ISP has a one article in a FAQ like:
What are "WinModems" and/or software dependent modems?
These are modems that leave some or most of the work needed in modulating or demodulating (translating and talking to the Internet) to the processor rather than completing all the work themselves. For various reasons, we do not recommend these modems...
Now, if some other ISP were to use it word for word, they would be violating copyright, but if they had the following (or any variation) it would be very difficult to claim it against the copyright:
What are Win and software modems?
Modems that leave much of the work of talking to the Internet (MODulating and DEModulating) to your processor rather than completing the function themselves are often referred to as WinModems (a category of software modems). For various reasons, we recommend using a real or hardware modem...
The similarities may appear blindingly but remember the conditions, same subject, same type of company. And remember, there's a reasion they're called Frequently Asked Questions.
In general, just about anything is able to have a copyright attached to it. There are conditions that will collapse a copyright if challenged in court however, like a commonly used phrase, insufficient to make something unique or a pre-existing work. Take twenty bucks to the copyright office and copyright your name, even John Smith will get through, but if you challenge someone or they challenge you, then it may be abolished (and you don't get your gas money back). This is what makes copyrights different from trademarks and patents; trademarks and patents have to be researched first, and naturally, cost more money.
<insert one-click patent jokes here>
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Compilations of information and the exact expression of that information is definitely copyrightable. Not only that, but the answers to those questions are obviously not common knowledge or else so many people would not be asking them. The fact is, someone put time into creating the document, answering the questions, and publishing the work. There was some thinking involved in selecting the appropriate questions, but also in categorizing and answering them in a way that would convey the information clearly.
One must think about the reason for copyright law in the first place. The laws are created to encourage the sharing of knowledge. Without copyright protection, the company might not want to publish their FAQ. They would be worried that someone would steal their work and claim it as their own. In this case, many obvious questions would inevitably go unanswered.
The court was justified in saying that the format and conventions used in creating a FAQ is simply a standardization on the best known method of representing the answers to commonly-asked questions. Denying that the format is copyrightable was adequate in this case since it addressed the issues that needed to be addressed. That's all they needed to say.
What the court added to this, however, was completely uncalled for. The court said that the particular publication was not copyrightable simply because it was a FAQ. So are you saying that by naming it a FAQ, the author waives all right to copyrighting the document? So the author could just change the name of the document to "Frequently-given-answers" -- would that be sufficient to now be able to copyright the work? Even if so, this would be counterproductive, since people can no longer used the word FAQ as a keyword for searching.
FAQ is simply a convention for naming a type of document with a standardized format. This convention should not be an implicit waiving of copyright priviliges. It's the content that is valuable here, not the format.
It didn't mean, "In addition to being unable to copyright the format and subject matter and types of questions asked in a FAQ, one also cannot copyright the rest of the contents of a FAQ either." It meant, "In addition to the FAQ formats being dissimilar enough in this case that copying cannot be proven, it is also the case that the very type of suit put forth by the plantiff, where it was alleged that a FAQ with similar questions and a similar format is a copyright violation, can't even be done in the first place, even if the formats really were similar." That's what the "step further" was about - in addition to the claim being unproven in this case, even if it was proven it wouldn't be enough in any case to show that the other party has a FAQ with similar questions and format.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.