Copyright Law and College Course Catalogs?
‘How can you sue someone for stealing something that does not belong to you? That is the question AcademyOne, a company that aggregates course data from various colleges to facilitate the transfer of credits between institutions, is asking CollegeSource, an older company that offers similar services. CollegeSource is suing AcademyOne for paying contractors in China to systematically download PDF copies of college course catalogs — which CollegeSource itself had acquired for free and compiled, over the years, in a database that spans more than a decade. […]
The lines of ownership here are fine. On its website, CollegeSource claims copyright on “the text, graphics, images, video, design, course description data, PDF college catalogs, [and] information” in its database — as well as its “organization, compilation, [and] look and feel.” But U.S. copyright law might not apply to college course catalogs even for the professors or registrars who originally produced them, says one university lawyer.’ - Inside Higher Education
In short, CollegeSource’s argument for the legal protection of this data is that they have spent more than a decade assembling it, and thus to have the information then scraped by their potential competitor seems unjust. But the argument against actual copyright protection of their gathered information is that the material may not fall under copyright law at all. Previous rulings such as that of U.S. Supreme Court case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Company (1991) have decreed that copyright law can not apply to materials such as telephone directories…that is, aggregations of facts without original creation on the part of the compiler, and thus perhaps a college course catalog is of a similar vein. We shall see.
