Copyright Data and Creativity in the Digital Age

<p>The Supreme Court of the United States in <em>Feist v. Rural</em> (1991) required that databases must have a minimal degree of creativity for copyright. The judgment was highly significant and the subsequent period is understood as the post-Feist era. It has been globally influential. However the decision is extremely complex and remains unsatisfactorily interpreted. In particular it has been impossible to illuminate the creativity requirement.</p><p>The book gives an account of the decision’s conceptual structure focusing on its full delineation of the opposite to creativity. In a radical and unprecedented innovation it is correlated with an automatic computational process. Creativity itself is understood as non-computational or directly human activity concerned with meaning. Determining the presence of creativity is reduced to a four-stage test. This work then has acute practical current relevance to property in data in the digital age; it will also be of theoretical interest to and is aimed at researchers in practitioners and students of intellectual property worldwide. </p>