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Originally Posted by Texas Aggie
As an IP lawyer myself, I can tell you that "original material," as you suggest, is not the standard. In fact, the USSC has ruled that the level of creativity does not necessarily have to be that high. Perhaps whoever wrote the original OBR code might have had a copyright infringement case against the first Fed code but that's their problem, and that horse is long out of the barn. It isn't relevant to this issue.
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Sure it's relevant. If you can show material is cribbed from somewhere else, they can't defend a copyright in it. And it's so easy to do that in this case, people are always searching for the
differences in the codes, they're so subtle.
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Plus, the issue here isn't whether there is a text file somewhere of ONLY the Fed rules starting with Rule 1 and ending with the last paragraph of the final rule. The issue is that there is what appears to be a downloadable PDF file of the actual rule book with everything that goes with it. The argument you make with respect to the OBR is only relevant to the hypothetical text file. The PDF file, which includes the other stuff Fed put in, IS under their copyright and is enforceable (to the extent they want it to be).
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Of course it is. Even the details of text layout of the rules themselves are copyrightable, except to the extent the merger doctrine applies -- i.e. where there are only a few reasonable ways to lay them out. Indeed Fed's football rulebooks used to be models of clarity in part because of details of layouit, compared to other codes, because there
are various conceivable ways to lay them out -- the other codes did so and were harder to look up answers in quickly.
But it's not those details that most people are interested in. Most people just want text in an easily searchable form, and all one needs to get that is to make a .txt copy of that portion of the file and distribute that.