Bifalgorithm post · Property · Eligibility
Copying Dispute
Copying Dispute (Property · Eligibility) — "Of the 11 telephone companies, only Rural refused to license its listings to Feist. Rural’s refusal created a probl…
Ideas in this flowchart
- Feist used Rural’s white-pages listings without consent, leading to a copyright dispute.
- Rural was the only one of the 11 telephone companies that refused to license its listings to Feist.
- Omitting Rural’s listings would have created a major gap in Feist’s area-wide directory and reduced its appeal to yellow-pages advertisers.
- Because it could not license the listings, Feist used them without Rural’s consent.
- Feist removed several thousand listings outside the geographic range of its area-wide directory.
- Feist hired personnel to investigate the remaining 4,935 listings, verify Rural’s data, and obtain additional information.
- Despite these additions, 1,309 of Feist’s 46,878 listings were identical to listings in Rural’s 1982–1983 white pages.
- Four identical listings were fictitious entries Rural had inserted to detect copying.
- Rural sued Feist for copyright infringement in the District Court for the District of Kansas.
- Rural argued that Feist could not use information contained in Rural’s white pages when compiling its own directory.
