This Wikipedia extract is quite helpful: Compilations and the sweat of the brow doctrine "Facts are considered synonymous to "ideas" or "discoveries" under this law and are not copyrightable. By extension, a compilation of uncopyrightable facts is also uncopyrightable. However, § 103 of the Copyright Act allows for the protection of "compilations," provided there is an "creative" or "original" act involved in such a compilation, such as in the selection (deciding which things to include or exclude), and arrangement (how they are shown and in what order). The protection is limited only to the selection and arrangement, not to the facts themselves, which may be freely copied. The Supreme Court decision in Feist v. Rural further made clear the requirements that a compilation be original in its composition, in denying protection to telephone "white pages". The Feist court rejected what was known as the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, in ruling that no matter how much work was necessary to create a compilation, a non-selective collection of facts ordered in a non-creative way is not subject to copyright protection". The essence of any case brought be Pierce would need to be a claim that what someone had copied was not just the FACTS, but Pierce's ARRANGEMENT of them. Thus, Pierce would certainly have a strong case against anyone who photocopied chunks of the book and gave it to someone else. But if someone copied out numbers and dates from the book by hand, in a different order or arrangement, Pierce would find it very much more diffficult to make a case. I hope you don't mind me continuing this discussion folks. I find it genuinely interesting and it will be useful as illustrative material for the Law unit i am teaching next block (semester)! I am most sympathetic to Pierce. The existence of the internet, and modern scanning and word-processing technology, is having wide-ranging effects. For an interesting musical copyright case, involving editing sheet music, you might like to Google Hyperion copyright case. The implications of the decision here are potentially huge.
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