Originality and Utilitarian Works: The Uneasy Relationship between Copyright Law and Unfair Competition
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Courts have struggled with articulating the standard for “originality” in copyright law. Some judges have leaned towards a “sweat of the brow” theory, that rewards authors for their investment of labour in creating a work. Others, most notably, the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark decision of Feist Publications Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. Inc., have held out for a standard which requires some “spark” or modicum of creativity.\n\tIn this article, the author examines the concept of “originality” in light of the shifting purposes of copyright law in Canada, and the historical relationship of utilitarian works to copyright law. Works such as directories and factual compilations owe their value not to their contents, which are often in the public domain, but to the effort that has gone into collecting those contents. The scope of protection of such “utilitarian works” to be offered under copyright law has generated controversy in case law and commentary. By examining the treatment of the concept of “originality” in recent Canadian cases dealing with utilitarian works, the author explores the uneasy relationship between unfair competition law and copyright law in Canada. She argues that the proliferation of utilitarian works protected by copyright, and in particular, information products, has rendered a threshold for originality extremely problematic. She argues that the problem lies in the tension between copyright and unfair competition, primarily in relation to utilitarian works. Copyright, she concludes, is an inapt vehicle for resolving issues of competition in the information economy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it