Morris S. Arnold

“ MDC also argues that the Decision Star Pagination Feature does not infringe West's copyright because its citations to page numbers in West reporters are merely statements of pure fact. The flaw in this argument is that it does not distinguish between isolated use of the factual aspects of a compilation or arrangement and wholesale appropriation of the arrangement. "Isolated instances of minor infringements, when multiplied many times, become in the aggregate a major inroad on copyright that must be prevented." ”

“ Several other reasons persuade us not to give Banks the full force for which MDC contends. If it involved the copyright claims of an official reporter, so too did Callaghan, and yet Callaghan does not seem so hostile to the very idea that case compilation, arrangement, and paging can be protected by copyright. To the extent that Banks diverges from Callaghan, we of course follow the Supreme Court. Banks, moreover, requires a greater degree of intellectual creativity than the trend of modern cases, see, e.g., Rockford Map, supra. ”

“ The plaintiff in Banks argued that its case arrangements were the product of sufficient intellectual labor to be copyrightable because the reporter's general, though not unalterable, approach in arranging cases was to begin each volume with what he considered to be the most important cases on hand and to group cases on the same subject matter together. The Banks court responded by noting that the official reporter was required by statute to prepare reports of Supreme Court decisions, gather them into volumes, and have them printed and published. ”

“ An arrangement of opinions in a case reporter, no less than a compilation and arrangement of Shakespeare's sonnets, can qualify for copyright protection.
We find support for this view in Callaghan v. Myers, 128 U.S. 617, 32 L.Ed. 547, 9 S.Ct. 177 (1888) , which indicates that an original arrangement of opinions is copyrightable whenever it is the product of labor, talent, or judgment. The plaintiff in that case, Myers, held copyrights for several volumes of reports of the Supreme Court of Illinois. ”

“ However, MDC has cited no authority, nor do we see any persuasive argument, for the proposition that because consumers may find an infringing work uneconomical, the work is not an infringement. An author's rights in a copyrighted work protect the author not only against infringing works less expensive than the original, but against more expensive infringements as well. Further, though this use of Decision may presently be uneconomical, changes in technology and other market conditions could well alter the situation. ”

“ It is not necessary that the work be novel or unique, but only that the work have its origin with the author – that it be independently created. Hutchinson Telephone Co. v. Fronteer Directory Co., 770 F.2d 128, 131 (8th Cir. 1985) . ”

“ Catalda Fine Arts, 191 F.2d 99, 102–103 (2d Cir. 1951) ; see also M. Nimmer, 1 Nimmer on Copyright § 2.01 (1985) .
To be the original work of an author, a work must be the product of some "creative intellectual or aesthetic labor." Goldstein v. California, 412 U.S. 546, 561, 37 L.Ed.2d 163, 93 S.Ct. 2303 (1973) . However, "a very slight degree of such labor [,] ... almost any ingenuity in selection, combination or expression, no matter how crude, humble or obvious, will be sufficient" to make the work copyrightable. M. Nimmer, 1 Nimmer on Copyright, supra, § 1.08 [C] [1] ”