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In Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court held that the defendant's compilation of facts consisting of names and telephone numbers in its white pages lacked the requisite "modicum of creativity" and, as such, was not entitled to copyright protection.
Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. (Rural), was a certified public utility which provided telephone service to a number of communities in northwest Kansas. Rural also published a telephone directory consisting of both white and yellow pages for which it had filed and received a copyright registration. Feist Publications, Inc. (Feist) published an area-wide telephone directory which covered 11 different telephone service areas. In order to obtain white pages listings for its directory, Feist approached each of the 11 telephone companies operating in the area and offered to pay for the right to use the listings. Only Rural refused permission for Feist to use its white page listings. Nonetheless, without Rural's consent, Feist extracted the listings it needed from Rural's directory and copied them into its own directory. Although Feist altered some of the listings, many were identical to listings in Rural's white pages. Rural sued, claiming that the copyright of Rural's directory had been infringed. Both the district court and Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals found that Feist had infringed upon Rural's copyright. The U.S. Supreme Court accepted the case for review and overturned the lower courts' decisions.
The Supreme Court acknowledged that telephone directories are compilations and the Copyright Act specifically states that compilations are copyrightable. However, the Court also noted that the touchstone of eligibility for copyright registration and protection is originality in the work created. The originality requirement is satisfied where there is an "independent creation plus a modicum of creativity." The Court held that while Rural expended sufficient effort to make the white pages directory useful, it lacked sufficient creativity in its selection and arrangement of facts (names and numbers) to entitle its compilation to protection. The Court found that Rural exercised no selection in which names to include, as this was dictated to them by the requirements of the state's utility commission. Further, the alphabetical arrangement of those names required no creativity whatsoever. The Court found that all of Rural's work in compiling the facts in the directory did not equate to the required creativity.
In reaching its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court did not indicate how creativity was to be determined or measured, but did suggest that a lot of creativity was not required in order to meet the threshold requirement for a work to be copyrightable. All that was required was a modicum of creativity in the work.
Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc., 499 U.S. 340, 111 S. Ct. 1282 (1991).