Treatment of directories, databases and other entities that are essentially collections of address details and involve little creativity has been a vexing issue for legislators and theorists. In 1991, in what has become known as the Feist case, a US court decided that telephone directories were sufficiently unoriginal and so uncreative - just names, numbers and a basic categorisation, that they did not qualify for protection under that nation's copyright law. The court indicated that the 'sweat of the brow' involved in generation of the directory did not suffice for copyright protection. We have pointed to discussion of that decision and its implications. The Australian decision rejects the Feist doctrine, with the court deciding that Telstra deserved protection for its selection, arrangement and presentation of directory information.
Telephone directories, like web search engines, are big business.
British Telecom for example has just sold its directory arm for over a billion dollars. Telstra's copyright was infringed by a company that reproduced a substantial part of the Yellow Pages and White Pages directories for use on CDs that it marketed commercially. For example, the CD was arranged by postcode rather than geographical location, contained full mailing addresses, used a different font to the Telstra directory and didn't use multiple columns. Telstra claimed that the substance of the information on the CD had been copied from its products. It did not assert ownership of individual names and numbers, in line with the law's protection of expression rather than facts.