Klarinet Archive - Posting 000827.txt from 2004/03

From: Oliver Seely <oseely@------.edu>
Subj: [kl] Re: Copyright (was: The Opera) (was: Education) is 8-)
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 15:05:28 -0500

Although one hears the phrase "you can't copyright this or that" all the
time, what one ought to say is that "this or that claim to copyright most
probably won't stand up in court" because U.S. Copyright Law oozes along
according to case law and one never really knows until something is decided
by a judge. In between there is a lot of yelling, screaming, pontificating
and grandstanding on the matter. In that context,one of the most amusing
cases in recent times, to me anyway, was the celebrated Feist Publications
vs. Rural Telephone Services case which was decided by the Supreme Court in
1991. Consider the situation: lawyers for Feist advised that Rural's
claim to copyright on their telephone subscriber list wouldn't stand up in
court. On the other side an equally distinguished cabal of scoundrels
advised Rural that they MUST sue to protect their copyright. Sandra Day
O'Conner said, writing for the majority, that names themselves, as facts,
were not copyrightable and putting them in alphabetical order was not in
the least sense creative but a time-honored custom. Feist won the day,
which triggered two failed attempts by Representative Coble of North
Carolina to push through the Copyright Piracy Act, which would have, among
other things, made my use of "copyrighted" scores of works long in the
public domain illegal to use to create my free Web-based files of the same
works.

You can read the whole opinion at the Cornell University Web site. It
makes good reading.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_340.htm

Oliver

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