Court Opinion

ID: 9487988
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:33:03.73841+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:37.364988
License: Public Domain

KRAVITCH, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
The facts of this case present a very close question, and Judge Godbold has written a well-reasoned and forceful opinion. Nonetheless, I dissent. I conclude that this case is factually similar to BellSouth Adv. & Pub. Corp. v. Donnelley Info. Publ., 999 F.2d 1436, 1441 (11th Cir.1993) (en banc), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 114 S.Ct. 943, 127 L.Ed.2d 323 (1994), and, therefore, that we are bound by the holding of our en banc opinion.
BellSouth denied copyright protection for the selection of business listings used in the Yellow Pages after determining that the selection did not meet the “requirement of *957originality.” Id. at 1440 (citing Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Ser. Co., 499 U.S. 340, 344, 349, 111 S.Ct. 1282, 1287, 1290, 113 L.Ed.2d 358 (1991)). The en banc court determined that “[b]y employing its sales strategies, BAPCO discovered that certain subscribers describe their businesses in a particular fashion and were willing to pay for a certain number of listings under certain available business descriptions.” BellSouth, 999 F.2d at 1441. It held that BellSouth’s acts of selection were “not acts of authorship, but techniques for the discovery of facts” and that the Copyright Act “affords no shelter to the resourceful, efficient, or creative collector.” Id.
Warren Publishing’s selection of principal communities- is similar to BellSouth’s selection of business listings. Warren Publishing selects how to divide the country into individual cable systems and how to assign principal community names by ■
contacting] cable operators to come up with a cable system listing which identifies the way an operator’s service areas are managed.... To determine how to list systems in the Factbook, the -Faetbook staff, in conjunction with the cable system operators, determines what we call the ‘principal communities’ of their service areas. All data for each separately identified system (including data for other communities served) are reported under the ‘principal community’ heading.
Levine Affidavit, ¶¶ 11-12. Thus, like Bell-South, Warren Publishing contacts operators, asks them questions about how their systems are run, and uses the responses it receives to place the systems within the directory. In light of this similarity, I am not convinced that Warren Publishing’s selection of cable systems and principal communities involves significantly more originality than Bell-South’s selection of business listings.
Warren Publishing’s claim that “when some names are selected from á larger universe for use in a compilation, that list provides a distinctive, original selection entitled to protection,” Brief for Appellee at 18, conflicts with BellSouth. Like Warren Publishing, BellSouth selected its business classifications from a larger universe of available headings after contacting those who would be listed in the directory. BellSouth, 999 F.2d at 1473-74 (en banc) (Hatchett, J., dissenting) (noting that BellSouth selected approximately 7,000 classified headings from a list of 4,700 primary headings and 34,000 related possible headings).
Warren Publishing’s suggestion of copy-rightability because “the variation in the selections examined in the record demonstrates that starting from the same source material, authors seeking to present cable system information can and do select separate and distinct groups of systems to report,” Brief for Appellee at 18, is similarly refuted by BellSouth. In BellSouth, substantial variation in listings selected by competitors did not lead to a finding of originality. For example, as noted in the dissent, the “1985 Miami North directory contained] approximately 4,000 headings and [the] 1985 Miami South directory contained]. approximately 4,300 headings, as compared to the 7,000 headings in BAPCO’s 1981? Yellow Pages.” BellSouth, 999 F.2d. at 1474 (en banc) (Hatchett, J., dissenting).
Finally, the fact that BellSouth' compiled its own data is not sufficient to differentiate the cases. A compiler who takes facts from an outside source is not any more original under copyright law than a compiler who takes facts from its own files; its employees just may have worked harder. Id. at 1440 n. 10 (rejecting “sweat of the brow” or “industrious collection” theories; citing Feist Publications, 499 U.S. at 351, 111 S.Ct. at 1291).
Accordingly, in light of our en banc court’s holding in BellSouth, I cannot conclude that Warren Publishing’s acts of selection were sufficiently original to merit copyright protection in this Circuit.1 Respectfully, therefore, I dissent.