Opinion ID: 185372
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Requirement of Originality

Text: The plaintiffs' second challenge ostensibly rests upon FeistPublications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., in whichthe Supreme Court held that telephone listings compiled in awhite pages directory are uncopyrightable facts: The sinequa non of copyright is originality. 499 U.S. 340, 345 (1991). Originality is a constitutional requirement for copyrightbecause the terms Authors and Writings, as they appearin the Copyright Clause, presuppose a degree of originality. Id. at 346. The plaintiffs reason from this that the CTEA cannotextend an extant copyright because the copyrighted workalready exists and therefore lacks originality. Not so. Originality is what made the work copyrightable in the first place. A work with a subsisting copyright has already satisfied therequirement of originality and need not do so anew for itscopyright to persist. If the Congress could not extend asubsisting copyright for want of originality, it is hard to seehow it could provide for a copyright to be renewed at the expiration of its initial term -- a practice dating back to 1790and not questioned even by the plaintiffs today. The plaintiffs' underlying point seems to be that there issomething special about extending a copyright beyond thecombined initial and renewal terms for which it was initiallyslated. Nothing in Feist or in the requirement of originalitysupports this, however: All they tell us is that facts, likeideas, are outside the ambit of copyright. Undaunted intrying to advance their novel notion of originality, the plaintiffs point to cases that do not address the requirement oforiginality for copyright per se. They point to no case orcommentary, however, that calls into question the distinctionbetween a new grant of copyright -- as to which originality isan issue -- and the extension of an existing grant. Thatdistinction reflects, at bottom, the difference between theconstitutionally delimited subject matter of copyright and theCongress's exercise of its copyright authority with respect tothat subject matter. The plaintiffs do point out that the Supreme Court has saidthe Congress may not authorize the issuance of patentswhose effects are to remove existent knowledge from thepublic domain, or to restrict free access to materials alreadyavailable. Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 6 (1966). The Court similarly stated, over a century ago, that theissuance of a trademark could not be justified under theCopyright Clause because the subject matter of trademark isthe adoption of something already in existence. Trademark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Applied mutatis mutandis to the subject of copyright, these teachings would indeedpreclude the Congress from authorizing under that Clause acopyright to a work already in the public domain. The plaintiffs read the Court's guidance more broadly, inthe light of Feist, to mean that a work in the public domainlacks the originality required to qualify for a copyright. Thatis certainly not inconsistent with the Court's opinion: A workin the public domain is, by definition, without a copyright; where the grant of a copyright is at issue, so too is the work'seligibility for copyright, and thus the requirement of originali- ty comes into play. We need not adopt a particular view onthat point, however, as it has nothing to do with this case. Here we ask not whether any work is copyrightable --indeed, the relevant works are already copyrighted -- butonly whether a copyright may by statute be continued inforce beyond the renewal term specified by law when thecopyright was first granted. For the plaintiffs to prevail,therefore, they will need something other than the requirement of originality upon which to make their stand.