Page:Eastern Book Company & Ors vs D.B. Modak & Anr.pdf/52

http://JUDIS.NIC.IN variation will. To support a copyright there must be at least some substantial variation, not merely a trivial variation such as might occur in the translation to a different medium. Creativity in selection and arrangement, therefore, is a function of (i) the total number of options available, (ii) external factors that limit the viability of certain options and render others non-creative, and (iii) prior uses that render certain selections 'garden variety’.

35. In the case of Key Publications, Inc. v. Chinatown Today Publishing Enterprises, Inc., 945 F.2d.509, Key Publication published an Annual Classified Business Directory for New York City’s Chinese-American community. In 1990, Galore Publication published the Galore Directory, a classified directory for the New York Chinese American community. Key brought a suit against Galore Directory charging that Galore Directory infringed Key’s copyright in the 1989-90 Key Directory. The United States Court of Appeal held that individual components of compilation are generally within the public domain and thus available for public. There are three requirements for a compilation to qualify for copyright protection: (1) the collection and assembly of pre-existing data; (2) selection, coordination or arrangement of the data; and (3) the resulting work that comes into being is original, by virtue of the selection, coordination or arrangement of the data contained in the work. For originality, the work is not required to contain novelty. The doctrine of “sweat of the brow”, rewarded compilers for their efforts in collecting facts with a de facto copyright to those facts and this doctrine would prevent, preclude the author absolutely from saving time and effort by referring to and relying upon prior published material. It extended copyright protection in compilation beyond selection and arrangement - the compiler’s original contribution – to the facts themselves drawn on “sweat of the brow” is a copyright protection to the facts discovered by the compiler. The court discarded “sweat of the brow” notion of copyright law.

36. In Macmillan and Company v. K. and J. Cooper, 1924 Privy Council 75, action was brought by McMillan and Company to restrain the respondent-firm who was carrying on the trade and business of publishers of educational books, from printing, distributing or otherwise disposing of copies of the book published by the appellants. The ground on which the relief was claimed was that the appellants had a copyright in the book entitled “Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, Sir Thomas North’s Translation and that the respondent published subsequently a book entitled “Plutarch’s Life of Alexander the Great, North’s Translation”, as it had infringed the copyright to which the appellants were entitled in the earlier compilation. The Court noted the contents of the book of the appellants as also that of the respondent. As per the Court, the text of the appellant’s book consisted of a number of detached passages, selected from Sir Thomas North’s translation, words being in some instances introduced to knit the passages together so that the text should as far as possible, present the form of an unbroken narrative. The passages so selected were, in the original translation, by no means contiguous. Considerable printed matter in many instances separated the one from the other. The opinion of the Privy Council was that for the work done by the appellants, great knowledge, sound judgment, literary skill or taste in the inputs brought to bear upon the translation was not required, as the passages of the translation which