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PaulThe Copyright Act (17 USC Section 102(b)) states that "facts" cannot be copyrighted. The leading case on the subject is the Supreme Court's decision in Feist (sorry, I don't have the full name or cite handy). The Supreme Court held that a phone book's white pages are not protectable by the copyright laws. The white pages are a list of every single phone number and therefore just a list of "facts" that cannot be copyrighted. There are many other cases holding that complete lists of facts cannot be protected by copyright. I think Bob is right that a complete list of baseball cards in a particular set also cannot be copyrighted.
Strangely, the copyright laws do protect INCOMPLETE lists. If SCD published a checklist of its "100 Favorite" baseball card sets, no other publisher could copy that exact listing of 100 sets. The idea is that some level of creativity went into picking those 100 sets, and that kind of creativity is protected by the copyright laws. But when you try to compile a complete list (like the Standard Catalog's attempt to list every set), the Supreme Court says that no creativity is involved, just hard work, and hard work is not protected by the copyright laws.
There have been several attempts in recent years to amend the copyright laws to protect large collections of data. So far, Congress has decided not to pass any of these laws.
05-05-2003, 04:04 PM
Question for Bob Lemke
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