I'm sorry this post is going to be lengthy, but the Clayton article is very instructive and communicates something very different than what some of you are taking away from it. Remember to compare apples to apples in deriving your lessons from it.
The decision of the 7th Circuit Court
Thank you for the link to the article by Mr. Clayton. It gave me the kind of legal precedent data that I need for thinking this through. After reading about the court decisions in the first two cases, I was ready to throw up my hands and throw in the towel since it appeared that those courts could not see the creativity in a well constructed taxonomy. But that was due to the compare and contrast approach Clayton was using for his article. The other shoe came down with his next case study:
Clayton's third case study describes a system that is much closer to the catalog system Scott has developed, and the outcome of the litigation was much different than the first two cases. Some taxonomic systems ARE copyrightable:
Quote:
The 7th Circuit, in American Dental Association v. Delta Dental Plans Assoc., 126 F.3d 977 (7th Cir. 1997), upheld copyright protection for a taxonomy that classified dental procedures into groups, assigning each procedure a number as well as a description. The taxonomy qualified as original because of the many choices that had been made in picking particular numbers and grouping procedures. These "choices [are] original to the author of a taxonomy, and another author could do things differently." Id. at 979.
Some of you seem to have rather incomplete notions about what a true "catalog" is. Those who regard it as a glorified price list really miss the point in some rather fundamental ways. Pricing is the lesser part of what the Scott Specialized catalog does. Bear in mind that in order for something to qualify as a true catalog it does not have to have pricing at all. A reference catalog for anything is a taxonomic system. It classifies and arranges objects (entries) according to any number of criteria, grouping them according to a select set of characteristics, and then rostering them in an encoded set of entries, usually as the combination of a number and a description. But these numbers are seldom simple strings of integers arranged consecutively. In the case of the US Specialized catalog, they are alphanumeric strings that allow the encoded "number" to contain descriptive information based on its form. That is not a haphazard accumulation. It follows a logical design. Although the idea of the design cannot be copyrighted, the manner of its execution can, as the decision of the 7th circuit court affirms. But the particular purpose of the system, and the nature of its numbers, can be constructed so as to preclude copyright protection, as the first two cases Clayton presents demonstrate.
The Scott Specialized as a taxonomic system
Let us consider the Scott Specialized Catalog of United States Stamps and Covers by looking at the nature of its entries. Does the sequence 28, 28b, 28A, 29 appear to be a logical and natural order, or does it represent something more than simple consecution? Does the ORDER of the numbers convey specific information about the entities listed? Is it intentional and purposeful, implying a design, or it is merely accidental?
Consider this table we find among the entries:
formerly currently
55----------63-E11e
56----------65-E15h
57----------67-E9e
58----------62B
Of itself, without knowing specifically what objects it references within the catalog, we observe that the items that used to be cataloged as simple entries have been reclassified as different kinds of entries, except in one case. And when we "parse" an entry such as 63-E11h we discover that the item fits an entirely different taxonomic category from its original listing; information that was already evident just from a comparison of one number to another. Moreover, we will discover that there is a logical order to the formation of these numbers which encode data according to the pattern of the classification system of the taxonomy. So, for example:
O3TCa
O3P1
O3P2
O3P2a
O3P3
O3P4
All these refer to items of different classes and forms but who all share a common face design. If you know the structure of the coding system, then you know that one is a trial color, one is a large die proof, one is a small die proof from a Roosevelt album, one is a small die proof from the Panama-Pacific exposition, one is a plate proof on India paper, and one is a plate proof on cardboard. That is a lot of information encoded into a string of numbers. And if you could know what an O3 is you could even tell what these things look like. The choice of number is not arbitrary, it is by design, and that design was created by an author and anyone else could come up with their own alternative way of doing the same thing.
Basis for Legal protection for taxonomic systems
If I blurted out the statement, "All the world's a stage." and then I snapped my fingers and said, "Ha, I just came up with that" would you believe me? Of course not. That sequence of words is not arbitrary. It (the sequence) has an author, and that sequence is well known as is its real author. If it had recently been created and was still subject to copyright, then my claim would constitute an infringement upon the author's right to protection under the law for his intellectual property.
Because the Scott numbering system is neither haphazard nor naturally occurring it is the product of intentional design. And just as the ordering of common words in an ordered sequence as a literary work is eligible for copyright protection as a work of art, so a catalog of numbered entries arranged according to a precise and ordered taxonomy is eligible for the same protection. And that was the finding of the 7th circuit court in the case of
American Dental Association v. Delta Dental Plans Assoc. in 1997.
[added:] Something many of you are overlooking in comparing the first two case studies Clayton cites is that the Scott Specialized is not merely listing items owned and sold by Scott as those two companies were. Scott is intentionally creating a record of all material known to exist, even though it is neither owned nor sold by the catalog producer. As such it is intended to be a reference work for an industry (philately) and not merely a product identifier for a company. So the conditions in those first two cases, and the limitations of their numbering systems, ought not be applied to the Scott schema.
Posted 02/12/2015 6:08 pm
