Rockford Map Publishers, Inc. v. Directory Service Co. of Colorado, Inc.

• Decision Date: 15 July 1985
• Docket Number: No. 84-2301,84-2301
• Citation: 768 F.2d 145
• Parties: , 1985 Copr.L.Dec. P 25,817 ROCKFORD MAP PUBLISHERS, INC., Plaintiff-Appellee, v. DIRECTORY SERVICE COMPANY OF COLORADO, INC. and Frances A. Anderson, Defendants-Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 145

768 F.2d 145

226 U.S.P.Q. 1025, 1985 Copr.L.Dec. P 25,817

ROCKFORD MAP PUBLISHERS, INC., Plaintiff-Appellee, v. DIRECTORY SERVICE COMPANY OF COLORADO, INC. and Frances A Anderson, Defendants-Appellants.

No. 84-2301.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued May 20, 1985.

Decided July 15, 1985.

Richard G. Lione, William Brinks Olds Hofer Gilson & Lione, Ltd., Chicago, Ill., for defendants-appellants.

Michael C. Payden, Leydig, Voit & Mayer, Ltd., Rockford, Ill., for plaintiff-appellee.

Before BAUER and EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judges, and CAMPBELL, Senior District Judge. ^*

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge.

A plat map shows the location, size, and ownership of parcels of land. Rockford Map Publishers makes plat maps of rural counties. They are useful to local residents and to sellers of farm equipment, who can learn the identities and needs of potential customers. Doubtless they have other uses as well.

Rockford Map starts with aerial photographs distributed by the Department of Agriculture. It traces the topographical features from the photographs and draws lines showing townships and sections. Then an employee goes to places where land titles are recorded and reads the books. The employee uses the legal descriptions of the deeds to draw boundary lines indicating the location and size of each parcel. He pencils in the name of the owner. From time to time Rockford Map updates the maps as ownership of land changes. Figure 1 is the result for one township in Ford County, Illinois.

Rockford Map has repeated this process for more than 500 counties throughout the United States. The first plat of Ford County was prepared in 1948, and a new one was prepared from scratch in 1956. Rockford Map published updated versions of the Ford County plat maps in 1961, 1964, 1966, 1969, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1983. The copyrights of several revisions, including the one in 1983, were registered. The most recent update took about 14 hours' work in the Ford County Courthouse. An employee of Rockford Map estimated that it would have taken him between 40 and 45 hours to do the research for Ford County from scratch.

Directory Service Co. also publishes plat maps. It starts with a square grid and draws in the information about ownership without regard to topographical features. When Directory Service decided to do a plat map of Ford County, it hired a local resident and gave her instructions about how to interpret information in the title records. In order to make her task easier, Directory Service enlarged Rockford Map's plat maps for Ford County. Directory Service told its agent to check the records using Rockford Map's map as a worksheet. ¹ If a search of the records revealed that Rockford Map's map was correct, the agent put a green check in the space depicting the parcel of land; if the map was incorrect, the agent overwrote the map in red. The agent also recorded information about parcels Rockford Map had deemed too small to put on its plat maps. The agent estimates that she spent 75 hours on these tasks for Ford County. When she was done she sent the corrected plat maps to Directory Service, whose staff produced a new map. Figure 2 is Directory Service's map for the same township in Ford County.

Rockford Map could tell by looking at Directory Service's product that its plat maps had been used as templates. Some of the names in Rockford Map's maps have bogus middle initials. These initials, if read from the top of the map to the bottom, spell out "Rockford Map Inc." (Read down the column at 2400 E in the map, starting with Glenn R. Polson.) Rockford Map put these trap initials in the maps of four townships in Ford County. Directory Service's maps contained 54 of the 56 trap initials.

Both Rockford Map and Directory Service sell advertising space in their books of plat maps. But Rockford Map also sells the books, while Directory Service gives the maps away as part of a directory of residents. Understandably distressed by Directory Service's methods, if not by the fact of competition, Rockford Map filed this suit, contending that Directory Service violated the copyright laws. The district court held a two-day trial and entered judgment for Rockford Map. It ordered Directory Service to turn its working materials and maps over to the court, and it enjoined further publication of infringing maps. The court awarded statutory damages of $250 and attorneys' fees of about $22,000. Its decision also controls numerous other cases between these parties concerning publications in other counties, cases held in abeyance pending the result of this litigation.

Directory Service's principal argument on appeal is that Rockford Map's plat maps are not copyrightable. But 17 U.S.C. Sec. 103(a) provides that "compilations" are copyrightable, subject to the limitation in Sec. 103(b) that the copyright in a compilation "extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from any preexisting material employed in such work." (This is the 1976 Act; the 1909 version is not materially different.) In other words, when the contribution lies in the arrangement of facts, only the arrangement is protected by the copyright. Rockford Map could not copyright the information in the deeds on file in the county courthouse, but it could and did copyright the arrangement of that information on a plat map.

The copyright laws are designed to give people incentives to produce new works. See Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, --- U.S. ----, 105 S.Ct. 2218, 2223-24, 85 L.Ed.2d 588 (1985); Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 104 S.Ct. 774, 782, 807, 78 L.Ed.2d 574 (1984). They allow people to collect the reward for their contributions. If the incremental contribution is small, so too is the reward, but a subjective assessment of the importance of the contribution has nothing to do with the existence of copyright.

Directory Service maintains that Rockford Map produced its plat maps with so little effort that the result may not be copyrighted. The court remarked in Schroeder v. William Morrow & Co., 566 F.2d 3, 5 (7th Cir.1977), that "only 'industrious collection,' not originality in the sense of novelty, is required." The expenditure of 14 hours to update the maps of Ford County, or even 45 to start from scratch, is not very "industrious," Directory Service tells us.

The copyright laws protect the work, not the amount of effort expended. A person who produces a short new work or makes a small improvement in a few hours gets a copyright for that contribution fully as effective as that on a novel written as a life's work. Perhaps the smaller the effort the smaller the contribution; if so, the copyright simply bestows fewer rights. Others can expend the same effort to the same end. Copyright covers, after all, only the incremental contribution and not the underlying information. Mazer v. Stein, 347 U.S. 201, 74 S.Ct. 460, 98 L.Ed.2d 630 (1954).

The input of time is irrelevant. A photograph may be copyrighted, although it is the work of an instant and its significance may be accidental. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 4 S.Ct. 279, 28 L.Ed. 349 (1884); Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co., 188 U.S. 239, 23 S.Ct. 298, 47 L.Ed. 460 (1903); Time, Inc. v. Bernard Geis Assoc., 293 F.Supp. 130 (S.D.N.Y.1968) (Zapruder film of Kennedy assassination). In 14 hours Mozart could write a piano concerto, J.S. Bach a cantata, or Dickens a week's installment of Bleak House. The Laffer Curve, an economic graph prominent in political debates, appeared on the back of a napkin after dinner, the work of a minute. All of these are copyrightable. ² Dickens did not need to complete Bleak House before receiving a copyright; every chapter--indeed every sentence--could be protected standing alone. Rockford Map updates and republishes maps on more than 140 counties every year. If it put out one large book with every map, even Directory Service would concede that the book was based on a great deal of "industry." Rockford Map, like Dickens, loses none of its rights by publishing...