In British/Irish Law, a 'white pages' phone book is not copyrightable in
spite of its being a 'collection of facts'.  this is because it is something
that is a byproduct of managing a telephone system.  I am not sure about the
golden pages (which business listings, with advertising).
David.

2008/9/29 Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]>

> Actually, I'm pretty sure a phone book is not, in the US, in general,
> copyrightable.
>
> I don't believe US law has any special protection for "collections of
> facts". The canonical introductory intellectual property class example,
> which happens to be about a phone book in fact, is Feist v. Rural Telephone
> Service. Which in fact even has it's own wikipedia page:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
>
> Jonathan
>
> Shawn Boyette wrote:
>
>> Individual facts or datum are not copyrightable, but "collections of
>> facts" -- particular expressions of data -- are. This is what makes
>> phone books, databases, and the like subject to copyright.
>>
>> P.S. N.B. IANAL
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Interestingly, outside the US it's somewhat more possible to claim
>>> copyright
>>> on "factual data" than inside the US, Europe for instance has types of IP
>>> and copyright protection for databases that the US does not.
>>>
>>> But basically, the answer is that nobody knows for sure, not even the
>>> lawyers.
>>>
>>> Jonathan
>>>
>>> Bryan Baldus wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Tuesday, September 23, 2008 4:17 PM, Nate Vack wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Huh. They claim copyright of these records. I'd somehow thought:
>>>>> 1: The federal government can't hold copyrights
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> The page [1] states:
>>>>
>>>> "Copyright"
>>>> "Records in the MARC Distribution Services originating with the Library
>>>> of
>>>> Congress are copyrighted by the Library of Congress for use outside the
>>>> United States. Subscribers are granted copyright permission to
>>>> selectively
>>>> redistribute records outside the United States; contact LC prior to any
>>>> distribution."
>>>>
>>>> So, in the U.S., they are not copyrightable, but outside the U.S. some
>>>> copyright claim might be justified.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> 2: As purely factual data, catalog records are conceptually
>>>>> uncopyrightable
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> For the most part, personally I would agree with this, at least for
>>>> individual records (though some parts of the record, like the 520
>>>> summaries,
>>>> might contain enough original creativity that could be considered
>>>> copyrightable). Others might believe otherwise, at least as it pertains
>>>> to
>>>> the collection of the records as a whole--for example, OCLC's copyright
>>>> claims on their database of records.
>>>>
>>>> ##########################
>>>>
>>>> On the Fred 2.0 records, aside from their age, I wish they were
>>>> available
>>>> in MARC 21 format rather than XML with NFC encoding. When I tried to use
>>>> MarcEdit to convert the files from XML to MARC 21 (January 2007), I ran
>>>> into
>>>> issues with character encodings. The files also seemed to lack header
>>>> lines
>>>> like:
>>>> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>>>> <collection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim">
>>>>
>>>> [1] <http://www.loc.gov/cds/mds.html#lcaf>
>>>>
>>>> Thank you for your assistance,
>>>>
>>>> Bryan Baldus
>>>> Cataloger
>>>> Quality Books Inc.
>>>> The Best of America's Independent Presses
>>>> 1-800-323-4241x402
>>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> --
>>> Jonathan Rochkind
>>> Digital Services Software Engineer
>>> The Sheridan Libraries
>>> Johns Hopkins University
>>> 410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Jonathan Rochkind
> Digital Services Software Engineer
> The Sheridan Libraries
> Johns Hopkins University
> 410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu
>



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