Kenya

What is original?

Original is many times confused with the term creative but original may mean

That its not a copy; - copy – its not a reprint of another and it is not a copy version of another, it embodies skill and judgment i.e. a work must embody skill and judgment to be copyrightable –Feist v Rural (US) a company published a white pages directory, another company copied the entries and published a yellow pages directory, they even copied trap entries.

 In the supreme court the white pages directory said the yellow pages was infringing and yellow pages argued that what white pages had was not copyrightable but it was only sweat and brow,  sweat and brow are not copyrightable. 

What white directory had entered was mere data and was not works of skill. Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), commonly called just Feist v. Rural, was a United States Supreme Court case in which Feist copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable, and that therefore no infringement existed.