Intellectual Property Protection of Fact-based Works

The 1991 US Supreme Court decision in Feist Publications Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co . held that factual matter is not subject to copyright protection because it is not original to the author, thus dramatically rejecting a two-century-old tradition of protecting factual compilations under copyright. The contributors to this book reassess this decision and its implications, particularly for the protection of electronic databases. The debate over fact-based works has grown still more compli