Last spring, the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York decided the case of Hyperlaw v. West Publishing Co (See: http://www.nylj.com/links/hyperlaw.html). The Court held in favor of Hyperlaw, saying that "in sum, each of the changes that West makes to the cases it reports are trivial and, taken separately or collectively, they do not result in a distinguishable variation of the opinion written by the court."
West (with Arthur Miller, of counsel) has appealed the decision. They argue primarily that, due to the many editorial changes they make in the opinions, they are entitled to copyright protection of the resulting work. Lexis-Nexis (represented by Jon Baumgarten) has also filed a brief that argues for copyright in the compiled work based on the selection of materials for inclusion.
Below are downloadable versions of a brief filed with the Court of Appeals on behalf of the 5 major U.S. library associations (see the brief for descriptions). The brief is about 40 pages long.
To get the WordPerfect or Word versions of the file, hold down the shift key and at the same time click the left mouse button on the version of your choice. Your browser should prompt you to save the file on your hard disk. Once you have saved it to a file on your hard drive you should be able to open and print the file using any word processing software.
- WordPerfect 6.1 - brief.wpd
- Microsoft Word 6.0 - brief.doc
- Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf) - brief.pdf
To get the PDF version of the file, just click the link. 
To View or Print a PDF file, you need the Acrobat reader. The software is available FREE, from Adobe. For more information, visit Adobe's web site at http://www.adobe.com.
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