Background
Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. is a telephone cooperative providing services for areas in northwest Kansas, with headquarters in the small town of Lenora, in Norton County. The company was under a statutory obligation to compile a phone directory of all their customers free of charge as a condition of their monopoly franchise.
Feist Publications, Inc. specialized in compiling telephone directories from larger geographic areas than Rural from other areas of Kansas. They had licensed the directory of 11 other local directories, with Rural being the only hold-out in the region. Despite Rural's denial of a license to Feist, Feist copied some 4000 entries from Rural's directory. Because Rural had placed a small number of phony entries to detect copying, Feist was caught.
Prior to this case, the substance of copyright in United States law followed the sweat of the brow doctrine, which gave copyright to anyone who invested significant amount of time and energy into their work. At trial and appeal level the courts followed this doctrine, siding with Rural.
Read more about this topic: Feist V. Rural
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