Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Co.
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
158 F.3d 693 (1998)
West Publishing (defendant) published printed judicial opinion compilations whose volume and page numbers became a standard legal citation format; Matthew Bender and HyperLaw (plaintiffs) produced competing electronic compilations using 'star pagination' to show where each page would fall in West's printed edition, even though West's own compilations didn't include all the opinions in the plaintiffs' electronic versions. The plaintiffs sought a declaratory judgment that this star pagination didn't infringe West's copyright; the district court granted summary judgment for Bender and partial summary judgment for HyperLaw, and West appealed.
Whether reference to a compilation's page numbers in another compilation creates an infringing copy of the initial compilation.