copyright law A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

that may provide copyright protection to a compilation (or collection) of material, irrespective of copyright in the underlying material. In the

copyright law in the United States The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of thei ...

, such copyright may exist when the materials in the compilation (or "

collective work A collective work is a work that contains the works of several authors assembled and published under the direction of one natural or legal person who owns the copyright in the work as a whole. Definitions vary considerably from one country to an ...

") are selected, coordinated, or arranged creatively such that a new work is produced. Copyright does not exist when content is compiled without creativity, such as in the production of a telephone directory. In the case of compilation copyright, the compiler does not receive copyright in the underlying material, but only in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of that material. In the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been des ...

, copyright in compilation due to the creativity of selection and arrangement is one facet of the

Database Directive The Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases is a directive of the European Union in the field of copyright law, made under the internal market provisions of the T ...

of 1996, which also protects

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

s from extraction of substantial content that represents significant work by the compiler.

Copyright of material used in compilation

A compilation may include any combination of

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...

material or copyrighted material, owned by the compiler or others. If a compilation uses material under copyright by someone else, compilation protection does not grant the compiler rights to that material or permission to use it without license, and it does not give the compiler the right to prevent others from reusing the individual elements in the compilation. Rather, it exists independently of any copyright protection that may apply to the material used in the compilation itself. Confusion sometimes occurs when the copyright status of the elements is conflated with the copyright status of the compilation. For instance, copyright on a filmed musical may lapse, but public display of the film without license may remain a copyright infringement if the songs performed therein are still protected by copyright.

Examples

Under the U.S. law, which protects the human creativity expressed in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the material, the copyright office gives the following examples of compilations in which copyright might exist, as each represents compilations that reflect human creativity in preparation: * A directory of the best services in a geographic region * A list of the best short stories of 2011 * A collection of sound recordings of the top hits of 2004 * A book of greatest news photos * A website containing text, photos and graphics * An academic journal containing articles on a particular topic * A newspaper articles by different journalists * A catalog of texts and photographs.

''Feist v. Rural'' (1991)

A critical case to the application of copyright in compilation in U.S. law is '' Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.'', 499 U.S. 340 (1991), in which the

Supreme Court A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...

clarified the role of creativity in protection. In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...

. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed. Prior to this case, some U.S. courts were following the

sweat-of-the-brow Sweat of the brow is an intellectual property law doctrine that is chiefly related to copyright law. According to this doctrine, an author gains rights through simple diligence during the creation of a work, such as a database, or a directory. ...

doctrine, which gave copyright to anyone who invested significant amount of time and energy into their work. At trial and appeal level, the courts followed this doctrine, siding with Rural. The appeal centered on two well-established principles in United States copyright law: facts are not copyrightable; compilations of facts can be copyrightable. In regard to collections of facts, Justice

Sandra Day O'Connor Sandra Day O'Connor (born March 26, 1930) is an American retired attorney and politician who served as the first female associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. She was both the first woman nominated and th ...

stated that copyright can apply only to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not to the information itself. "Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement," O'Connor wrote. The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (that is,

fact A fact is a datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance, which, if accepted as true and proven true, allows a logical conclusion to be reached on a true–false evaluation. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scient ...

s, discoveries, etc.) from any source is fair game, but cannot contain any of the "expressive" content added by the source author. That includes not only the author's own comments, but also his choice of which facts to cover, his choice of which links to make among the bits of information, his order of presentation (unless it is something obvious like an alphabetical list), any evaluations he may have made about the quality of various pieces of information, or anything else that might be considered "original creative work" of the author rather than mere facts.

The European Union Database Directive (1996)

Shortly after the ''Feist'' decision, the European Union began working to create a unified approach to copyright in compilation for databases. In 1996, it released its Database Directive, which incorporated approaches that had previously been used in much of continental Europe requiring creativity in the selection and arrangement of collected material and the sweat-of-the-brow approach of areas like the United Kingdom. Under Article 3 of the Directive, databases which, "by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents, constitute the author's own intellectual creation" are protected by copyright as collections: no other criterion may be used by Member States. This may be a relaxation of the criterion for protection of collections in the

Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, was an international assembly held in 1886 in the Swiss city of Bern by ten European countries with the goal to agree on a set of l ...

, which covers collections "of literary and artistic works" and requires creativity in the "selection ''and'' arrangement" of the contents. Any copyright in the database is separate from and without prejudice to the copyright in the entries. Copyright protection is not available for databases that aim to be "complete"—that is, where the entries are selected by objective criteria: these are covered by ''

sui generis ''Sui generis'' ( , ) is a Latin phrase that means "of its/their own kind", "in a class by itself", therefore "unique". A number of disciplines use the term to refer to unique entities. These include: * Biology, for species that do not fit in ...

database rights A database right is a '' sui generis'' property right, comparable to but distinct from copyright, that exists to recognise the investment that is made in compiling a database, even when this does not involve the "creative" aspect that is reflect ...

. While copyright protects the creativity of an author, database rights specifically protect the "qualitatively and/or quantitatively substantial investment in either the obtaining, verification or presentation of the contents": if there has not been substantial investment (which need not be financial), the database will not be protected. Database rights are independent of any copyright in the database, and the two could, in principle, be held by different people.

References

{{Reflist United States copyright law Copyright law of the European Union