Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition
- Is the selection exhaustive (e.g., a parts catalog containing standard information for all of the parts sold by a particular company)?
- Is the coordination or arrangement obvious (e.g., is the information listed in alphabetical, numerical, or chronological order)?
The statute also provides that preexisting material or data “must be selected, coordinated, or arranged ‘in such a way’ as to render the work as a whole original. This implies that some ‘ways’ will trigger copyright, but that others will not.” Feist, 499 U.S. at 358 (citing 17 U.S.C. § 101 definition of “compilation”).
Examples:
- Generally, a selection consisting of less than four items will be scrutinized for sufficient authorship.
- A selection, coordination, and/or arrangement that is mechanical or routine, such as an alphabetical list of items added to a catalog within the past twelve months, a symmetrical arrangement of stones on jewelry, arranging geometric shapes in a standard or symmetrical manner, arranging notes in standard scales or in standard melodic or harmonic intervals, or a musical work consisting solely of a musical scale(s).
- A selection, coordination, and/or arrangement that is commonplace such that it has come to be expected as a matter of course.
- A compilation that contains an obvious selection, coordination, and/or arrangement of material, such as a complete list of stories written by Zane Grey between 1930 and 1939, a complete collection of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, or a collection of a feature writer’s contributions to a particular newspaper over a period of six months arranged in chronological order.
- A selection that is dictated by law, such as a law requiring a telephone company to publish a directory containing the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of its subscribers.
- A selection, coordination, and/or arrangement of data that is practically inevitable, such as a standard organizational chart.
- Mailing or subscriber lists that contain standard information about a predetermined group of people organized in an obvious manner, such as an alphabetical list of all the names, telephone numbers, and email addresses for the members of the graduating class of a particular college or university.
- A compilation that contains an exhaustive selection of information where the information is presented in sequential order, such as a
Chapter 300 : 20
12/22/2014
