Circumstances and progress of the case

Rural Telephone Service Company were ‘a certified public utility providing telephone service to several communities in Kansas’ and were required to publish a directory of their subscribers, ‘[p]ursuant to state regulation’. A ‘typical telephone directory, consisting of white pages and yellow pages’ was published. Feist Publications, Inc., by contrast, was ‘a publishing company that specialize^] in areawide telephone directories covering a much larger geographic range than directories such as Rural’s’ (Feist, 1991a, Syllabus).

The copying activities which gave rise to the Supreme Court case of 1991 can be traced to 1978. When Rural refused to license its white pages listings to Feist for a directory covering 11 different telephone service areas, Feist extracted the listings it needed from Rural’s directory without Rural’s consent. Although Feist altered many of Rural’s listings, several were identical to listings in Rural’s white pages (Feist, 1991a, Syllabus).

Only Rural, of the 11 telephone service providers covered by the Feist directory, had refused to license their listings to Feist. Rural’s refusal stemmed from an unlawful purpose ‘to extend its monopoly in telephone service to a monopoly in yellow pages advertising’ (Feist, 1991a, p. 343). However, Rural’s refusal to license and possibly unlawful purpose, to create a monopoly, are deliberately excluded from consideration in the oral proceedings of the Supreme Court - ‘Mr. Caplinger, before you sit down, just as a matter of curiosity, what is the status of the antitrust aspect of this case?’ (Feist, 1991b, p. 48). They can then be acknowledged but continue to be placed out of scope, for our subsequent considerations. Feist’s use of license agreements may imply that they had initially held the common understanding that publishers of directories had property in their listings. Feist also conducted some independent research to add street addresses to entries.

The dispute was partly prompted by a transition in the production methods used by Feist for selecting and arranging data for their collective directories. For the alphabetization of data, Feist had further supplemented human labor by automated computer-based processes by 1983 (Feist, 1990a, pp. 45, 46; Feist, 1991b, pp. 25, 53; Rural, 1990, pp. 29-33, 36-38, 45-57), reflecting concurrent transitions in information technologies. Feist used human labor to keyboard data copied from Rural’s white pages directory, and sent files to a vendor for production of the collective printed directory, which would have included the integration of previously separate alphabetical arrangements. Interrogation of computer-held data, and the imposition of different orderings on coordinated units as part of the search process, was not yet fully part of the commercial practice for such directories.

The progress of the case can be traced. The District Court ‘granted summary judgment to Rural, explaining that “[c]ourts have consistently held that telephone directories are copyrightable” and citing a string of lower court decisions’. The Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed ‘for substantially the reasons given by the district court’, in an unpublished opinion (Feist, 1991a, Syllabus). The Supreme Court selects cases offered for appeal on the basis of their wide potential significance.

We granted certiorari, 498 U.S. 808 (1990), to determine whether the copyright in Rural’s directory protects the names, towns, and telephone numbers copied by Feist.

(Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Service Co., Inc., 1991, p. 344)

The Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the Court of Appeals, breaking with an apparently settled and not fully questioned consensus.

Cultural and legal aspects distinctive of the United States can be discerned. Provision of telephone services is by region, with no national provider. Feist’s directory aggregated together listings from different telephone service providers, in order to facilitate communication between and to their subscribers. There is also a strong commitment to public information embodied in the judgment.

The role of information technology in prompting the dispute implies some relation to the digital age.