Legal Question in Technology Law in Texas
Using online yellow page listings
Over the past several months I've been doing a lot of
research on licensing or using data from online
telephone books and I came across the Rural Telephone
Service Company court case document. It is referenced here:
http://floridalawfirm.com/feist.html
In summary, the conclusion of this case said ''that the names, towns, and telephone numbers copied by Feist were
not original to Rural and therefore were not protected by the copyright in Rural's combined white and yellow pages directory.''
And my question is this, if it isn't illegal to copy
directory listings from an actual hard copy telephone
book, why is it apparently illegal to copy information
from a yellow page directory online (on the internet) even if it is the same information (facts, no particular customization, simply in alphabetical order).
Because on all the online yellow page sites, in the
t&c, it says that all this information is copyright
and it cannot be copied.
I haven't seen any specific laws or legal information
about copying online phone directories, only hard copy
phone directories. Wouldn't this same judgment apply to the online versions if they are just providing factual information like that in the hard copy phone books?
2 Answers from Attorneys
Re: Using online yellow page listings
Reason, in brief, is that there was another decision specifically finding that the categorization and organization of yellow pages directories met the minimum creativity standard of Feist.
Best wishes,
LDWG
Re: Using online yellow page listings
Publishers of telephone directories (whether online or in printed form) don't own the raw data and cannot copyright it. Publishers don't own the phone numbers, they don't own the names of individuals or organizations, and they don't own the information about which numbers belong to whom. Since this information exists independently of what the publishers do, they can't claim any rights to it. They can, however, copyright the way they present it.
How listings are categorized, how they are laid out on the page, what links they contain and where they go, etc., are not part of the data but were instead added by the publisher. They are the publisher's intellectual property and can be copyrighted.
If the publisher of a particular directory claims to own the information he is overreaching. But it is not always easy for a layperson to figure out where the raw data ends and the publisher's work product begins. If you are planning to use the contents of an existing directory you might want to pay for a few hours of a lawyer's time so you can learn about any potential legal problems in time to avoid them.
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