The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the district court’s summary judgment in favor of Lexis Nexis, holding that the its compilation of electronic legal form templates was not substantially similar to plaintiff’s compilation and that plaintiff could not copyright the automation feature thereof. Ross Brovins & Oehmke v. Lexis Nexis Group, Case Nos. 05-1513 (6th Cir., Sept. 25, 2006) (Rogers, J). However, the court reversed the lower court’s 12(c) dismissal of a breach-of-contract claim, which is yet to be resolved.
Under a 1997 contract between the law firm of Ross Brovins, d.b.a. LawMode, and Lexis Nexis Group (Lexis), LawMode agreed to compile and organize templates of several hundred Michigan legal forms that Lexis would make publicly available by CD and internet. Although the compilation mostly included public domain forms, some original forms were included. In 2002, Lexis terminated the contract and published its own compilation of forms. Both parties used Lexis’ HotDocs Pro software to automate the forms by creating data entry "dialog boxes" and automatically replicating the user-entered data in relevant input fields.
LawMode filed suit against Lexis for copyright infringement, along with state contract and business torts claims. The latter claim was voluntarily dismissed. LawMode alleged that Lexis infringed its compilation copyright (i.e., selection and organization of the forms) and its automation copyright (i.e., for the appearance, selection and placement of input fields and interrelationships thereof). Following discovery, the district court granted summary judgment for Lexis on the copyright claim, but refused to dismiss the contract claim. The district court found that the organization of the forms and automation were not copyrightable. Subsequently, the district court dismissed the contract claim. LawMode appealed.
The appeals court upheld summary judgment on the copyright claim. With respect to LawMode’s selection of forms, the court found Lexis did not copy any "protectable" elements of the LawMode compilation and that the parties’ respective versions are were not substantially similar. The court noted that the Lexis compilation included 61 percent, or 350 of the 576 forms, from LawMode’s compilation. The court, relying on Feist, emphasized that "compilation copyright protection is very limited … usually requires substantial verbatim copying" and commented that "[s]ixty-one percent [could] hardly be considered the ‘same’ selection." In reference to the arrangement of forms, the court noted that similarities between the LawMode and Lexis compilations resulted from the parties copying of the uncopyrightable, "obvious classification headings" from Michigan’s public forms index.
With respect to the automation copyright, the court held that LawMode’s automation lacked sufficient originality to warrant copyright protection because (1) LawMode had simply elected to use the default software settings to create the dialog boxes, and (2) the selection and placement of input fields, along with the interrelationship thereof, was dictated by the express terms of the forms. The court stressed that such interrelationships may warrant copyright protection if the automation "communicate[s] information not expressly contained on the face of the underlying forms."
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