Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright.

The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.

The company was under a statutory obligation to compile and distribute a "white pages" phone directory of all its customers free of charge as a condition of its monopoly franchise.

Because Rural had placed a small number of phony entries to detect copying, Feist was caught.

Common sense tells us that 100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place.

The court clarified that the intent of copyright law was not, as claimed by Rural and some lower courts, to reward the efforts of persons collecting information—the so-called "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" doctrine—but rather "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const.

The court held that Rural's directory was nothing more than an alphabetic list of all subscribers to its service, which it was required to compile under law, and that no creative expression was involved.

That includes not only the author's own comments, but also their choice of which facts to cover, which links to make among the bits of information, the order of presentation (unless it is something obvious like alphabetical), evaluations of the quality of various pieces of information, or anything else that might be considered the author's "original creative work" rather than mere facts.

For example, a recipe is a process, and not copyrightable, but the words used to describe it are; see idea-expression divide and Publications International v. Meredith Corp.

[4] Feist proved most important in the area of copyright of legal case law publications.

In the same case, but in separate decisions in which Matthew Bender was not involved, HyperLaw successfully challenged West's text claims.

Similarly, during the case, West was acquired by the Canadian-based international publisher the Thomson Corporation.

Another case covering this area is Assessment Technologies v. Wiredata (2003),[9] in which the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a copyright holder in a compilation of public domain data cannot use that copyright to prevent others from using the underlying public domain data, but may only restrict the specific format of the compilation if that format is itself sufficiently creative.

In the late 1990s, Congress attempted to pass laws to protect collections of data,[10] but the measures failed.

[11] By contrast, the European Union has a sui generis (specific to that type of work) intellectual property protection for collections of data.

But the Supreme Court partially backed away from the originality doctrine in CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada.

But Desktop v Telstra held, like CCH Canadian, that collections of facts must not be copied from other sources to be eligible for protection.

In 2010, the Telstra decision was overturned by Justice Gordon in Telstra v Phone Directories,[13] following the decision of the High Court in IceTV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd.[14] In India, the Supreme Court case Eastern Book Company & Ors vs D.B.

Modak & Anr (where the respondents had compiled CD-ROMs of Supreme Court rulings with text sourced from copyedited publications of them by Eastern Book Company, albeit with copyrightable headnotes and other original content removed) cited both Feist and CCH Canadian, establishing that a work needed to demonstrate labor or effort—but not only labor—in order to be an "original", copyrightable work.