Australian Ice: Right on Schedule?

Slashdot had a post yesterday about an Australian copyright case (IceTV Pty Ltd & Anor v Nine Network Australia Pty Limited) in which leave was granted back in August to appeal to the High Court, Australia’s highest court. (The transcript of the leave hearing is available on the marvelous AustLII. Isn’t that a civilized way to run a legal system? Wouldn’t it make sense for transcripts of Supreme Court hearings to be available to all online?)

Seems IceTV published the weekly broadcast schedule of the competing Nine Network, along with that of other broadcasters; they have a TV guide on the home page of their website. Nine argued that under Australian law the schedule is protected as a compilation; the trial court disagreed, but the decision was reversed on appeal, which in turn has been appealed to the High Court.

There are interesting and often informative comments following the Slashdot post, surfacing a fundamental difference between the Australian basis and the American basis for copyright, the former having in part at least to do with protecting the effort invested in a project and the latter emphasizing the protecting, and, so, encouraging, of creativity. William Patry, an eminent American copyright lawyer and blogger, commented on the case at the appellate stage (shortly before he shut his blog down), and there is a valuable exchange of comments following that post as well.

Apart from any intrinsic interest this may hold, it’s worth following here because Canadian law also protects compilations as such. I’m interested because I once planned to publish online the tables of contents of law books published in Canada, as a searchable and therefore useful research tool; but I ran into stiff opposition from some publishers who claimed copyright in the “schedule” of their chapters, which always seemed to me perilously close to claiming copyright in mere facts.