Originality
Last time I said Copyright subsist on original creations of an author. But what do I mean by original? Something is original if is not derived from anything.
In a sense everything is a derivate, we stand on the shoulders of giants, we use the existing art, culture and ideas to come up with new art, culture and ideas. But this would mean there would be no copyright at all. On the other hand not having a originality doctrine means that copyright would also subsist on expressions which are already a common knowledge and that would be absurd.
For example it would be absurd if I write down the names of five random cities of India and claim that I should be granted copyright over the list because it my own original creation. But if I write a song describe these five cities I should uncontroversially get a copyright status over it. But where do we line?
Different courts at different countries have used different thresholds of originality. The courts in UK follow a system where something is granted a copyright status if labour, skill and judgement are required to produce it. Indian courts also follow a similar precedence which was established by case of D B Modak vs Eastern Book Company
D B Modak vs Eastern Book Company
Lawyers across India get the supreme court judgement from a journal which is called Supreme Court Cases (SCC) which is published by Eastern Book Company (EBC). EBC copy edits the original judgements and provides footnotes, headnote and additional citations for cases.
A Lawyers D B Modak compiled the SCC in a software system called Grand Juris and started selling CDs of it. When EBC came to know about this they sued D B Modak and the case reached the Supreme Court of India. The question before the Supreme Court was, should these copy edited judgements with headnotes and footnotes be called original creation of the author?
Our Supreme Court ruled against DB Modak, declaring SCC an original work as its creation required labour and writing footnotes and headnote require significant skill and judgement.
But our professor pointed out that judgement was totally wrong as here the question of originality does not arise at all.
Unlike United States where work produced by the Government goes to the public domain, in India the Government has copyright over the work produced by it and it grants anyone the right to reproduce or translate governmental work. Though every other right, including creation of adaptations is withheld by the Government. SCC being adaption of Supreme Court judgments, ECB doesn’t hold copyright over SCC as it is itself a copyright infringement.
Fiest vs Rural Telephone
United States uses a higher standard for originality than Indian or British courts. They use a standard of minimum creativity which was set in the case of Fiest vs Rural Telephone.
Rural Telephone was a company which used to compile telephone directories at county (district) level. Fiest was a bigger company who wanted to create common phone directory for the state of Kansas. Fiest first tried to negotiate a license with Rural Telephone but it refused, so Fiest simply copied the directory and compiled its bigger directory. Rural Telephone had inserted fake telephone number to detect copying and it sued Rural Telephone.
Individual telephone numbers are facts and they cannot be copyrighted, the court said “100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place”. The court passed a judgment in favor of Fiest establishing that copyright does not subsists on telephone directories.
