Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the case of Feist vs Rural Telephone Service:

It is a long-standing principle of United States copyright law that “information” is not copyrightable, O’Connor notes, but “collections” of information can be. Rural claimed a collection copyright in its directory. The court clarified that the intent of copyright law was not, as claimed by Rural and some lower courts, to reward the efforts of persons collecting information, but rather “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (U.S. Const. 1.8.8), that is, to encourage creative expression.

Since facts are purely copied from the world around us, O’Connor concludes, “the sine qua non of copyright is originality”. However, the standard for creativity is extremely low. It need not be novel, rather it only needs to possess a “spark” or “minimal degree” of creativity to be protected by copyright.

In regard to collections of facts, O’Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself. If Feist were to take the directory and rearrange them it would destroy the copyright owned in the data.

I rearrange the MTA’s data and destroy its copyright and create one of my own.

My iPhone application is a unique piece of art, as is the printed Metro-North Schedule.

However, neither the data in my application nor in the paper MTA schedule is copyrightable by me or Metro-North if someone chooses to take it and make something new with it.

This is the fundamental reason why facts are not copyrightable under US Copyright law. If they were, we would not be able to create anything. Just don’t copy people’s creativity. Facts are owned by everyone.

The law is quite clear on this, and the only reason MTA is fighting me on it is that they hope I will give up before it goes to court and it is proven. Once it is proven, MTA has a serious issue with its lucrative licensing deals.

What’s really interesting is that if I sign a licensing agreement with MTA, then I must use it under their terms, as the contract trumps copyright law.

However, as long as I do NOT sign the licensing agreement, I am free to.

I do not wish to screw MTA our of its intellectual property – I want them to stop making claims that they own copyright on information.