Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.

Facts

Rural Telephone Service (Plaintiff) in northwest Kansas provided a certified telephone service and published a typical telephone directory as a condition of its monopoly franchise.The white pages listed alphabetically the names, towns, and telephone numbers of Plaintiff’s subscribers. Feist Publications (Defendant) was a publishing company specializing in area-wide telephone directories. The Defendant’s directory, the subject of this litigation, contained 46,878 white pages listings, compared to Plaintiff’s listings of approximately 7,700.  Defendant approached the 11 northwest Kansas telephone companies and offered to pay for the right to use their respective white pages listings.  When only Plaintiff refused to license its listings, Defendant used them without the consent of Plaintiff.  A typical Feist (Defendant) listing included each person’s street address, while most of Rural’s (Plaintiff) did not.  Defendant’s 1983 directory of 46,878 listings contained 1,309 listings that were identical to listings in Plaintiff’s white pages.  Plaintiff sued for copyright infringement.  The district court granted summary judgment to Plaintiff, and the court of appeals affirmed. Defendant appealed.