Paraphrasing, Plagiarism, and Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone

Over on some other threads we have discussed paraphrasing, plagiarism, and how little creative contribution a Citizen here, or a contributor to the wikipedia, has to make for the CC and GFDL liscense oblige us to acknowledge their contributions.

Other Citizens have agreed that a contribution that merely corrects spelling or grammar is "de minimus". Similarly, adding a reference, without changing the text doesn't count as an intellectual contribution.

I first read about Feist v. Rural just over three years ago, when an intelligent, highly partisan, intellectually dishonest, sockpuppet vandal on the wikipedia filed a copyright violation that brought my work to a grinding halt. I confess, when I first read it I found aspects of it highly counter-intuitive. And when I have discussed it with people unfamiliar with it they find aspects of it counter-intuitive.

There were two relatively small companies involved in the underlying dispute in Feist v. Rural. The rulings in lower courts kept being challenged, and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court.

The suit concerned a company that repackaged the information in very small local phone companies' local phone books into larger regional phone books. For one of their phone books they contacted a dozen very small local phone companies, eleven of whom were willing to agree to terms under which they would release their files. The twelfth company would not agree to terms under which their information about their customers could be incorporated in the new regional phone book. So, for the info in the twelfth very small phone book they just paid someone to type the names and phone numbers in.

The twelfth very small phone company sued them for copyright violation.

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the ruling. She wrote that "facts" are not copyrightable. She wrote that lists of "facts" are not copyrightable. But particular lists could be copyrightable, if there was a "creative spark", something unique, about how they were represented. So, a list of the names and birthdates of hollywood starlets would not be protected by copyright. But a list that was cleverly formatted so it looked like a valentine heart from a distance would be copyrightable.

So, according to the ruling, the small company couldn't claim they owned the copyright on the list of names and numbers in their phone book, due to the effort they put into compiling it -- because without regard to the effort put into compiling it, the list required no creativity.

The copyright laws of some countries take a different interpretation. Australian copyright law, for instance, has a "sweat of the brow" interpretation. Under Australian law a list of facts can be copyright based on the effort those who compiled it put a lot of effort into it.

What does this mean for Citizendium contributors?

Well, if I come across a table, like a list of the technical specifications of a vessel, I have no hesitation about putting the information in that table into an article without altering its order.

Similarly, I have no hesitation to paraphrasing material I read, because the author can't copyright the underlying facts they report, only how they represent them.

How large or how small does a contribution have to be to merit copyright protection? I don't know. Justice O'Connor specifically said that the yardstick for "creative spark" was low.