Australian Judge Rules Facts Cannot Be Copyrighted

nfarrell writes "Last week, an Australian Judge ruled that copyright laws do not apply to collections of facts, regardless of the amount of effort that was spent collecting them. In this case, the case surrounded the reproduction of entries from the White and Yellow Pages, but the ruling referred to a previous case involving IceTV, which republishes TV guides. Does this mean that other databases of facts, such as financial data, are also legally able to be copied and redistributed?" Here are analyses from a former legal adviser to the directory publisher which prevailed as the defendant in this case, and from Smart Company.

Comments

Settled law in the United States

[Kirijini]

This has been settled law in the United States since the Supreme Court ruling in Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (1991). You can read the whole opinion on Google Scholar. I highly recommend reading it, it's a classic in American copyright law.

Re:Settled law in the United States

[Trepidity]

Particular representations of facts, like documentaries or photographs, can be copyrighted. It's the underlying facts that can't be, so you can't stop someone else from publishing the same facts in a way that doesn't use any of your creative presentation of them. In Feist, the court held that there wasn't any creative presentation at all, because listing all people in an area code in alphabetical order was just the bare facts, with no presentation that rose to the level of something copyrightable. If they had done something creative, they could copyright that part, but anyone could still extract and republish the names and phone numbers, because that bare list isn't copyrightable.