Question: FACTS Rural Telephone Service published a standard telephone directory, with "white pages" listing Rural's subscribers in alphabetical order, and "yellow pages" listing business subscribers by category and offering classified advertisements. Feist Publications, a publishing company specializing in area-wide telephone directories, sought a license to use Rural's white pages listings. When Rural refused permission, Feist used the listings without Rural's consent. Rural sued for copyright infringement, arguing that Feist was not permitted to copy Rural's information, but rather had to obtain the information directly via telephone surveys or door-to-door solicitations of Rural's subscribers. Feist argued that the information that it copied was not protected by copyright law. The lower courts ruled in Rural's favor; Feist appealed.

DECISION The U.S. Supreme Court noted that "[t]his case concerns the interaction of two-well established propositions. The first is that facts are not copyrightable; the other, that compilations of facts generally are." The Court went on to explain: The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author. Original, as the term is used in copyright, means only that that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. [E]ven a slight amount will suffice. Originality does not signify novelty; a work may be original even though it closely resembles other works as long as the similarity is fortuitous, not the result of copying. By contrast, compilations of facts (as opposed to facts themselves) may have sufficient originality to be copyrightable material: "The compilation author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the collected data so that they may be used effectively by readers.

These choices as to selection and arrangement, so long as they are made independently by the compiler and entail a minimal degree to creativity, are sufficiently original that Congress may protect such compilation through the copyright laws." But, as the Court emphasized, "[i]n no event may copyright extend to the facts themselves." Here, Feist had copied the names, towns, and telephone numbers of Rural's subscribers. These were merely uncopyrightable facts, however. Moreover, Rural had arranged this information in alphabetical order by last name within its own white pages. This arrangement was not original and creative, but rather "is an age-old practice, firmly rooted in tradition and so commonplace that it has come to be expected as a matter of course." Because Rural's white page listings were not copyrightable material, Feist's copying of those listings was not copyright infringement.