Bloggers sometimes feel like a woodsman working in a
desolate forest, wondering if reports of our efforts are ever heard in the
outside world. “Page view” statistics
are cold and unsatisfying. What bloggers
hunger for is to know whether anything we write actually resonates with our readers or, more fundamentally, whether we are
writing purely and solely for our own enjoyment.
One of my posts which has been well received outside my
online forest is
Stiffing Court Reporters and Experts Can Be Hazardous to Your Law License.
Court reporters understandably loved it and linked to it.
It is therefore with some trepidation that I
undertake this essay, which is bound to make me about as popular in court
reporting circles as a turd in a punchbowl.
Stiffing Court Reporters is an account of Colorado Supreme Court
decisions holding that failing to pay the silent partner in every deposition is
unethical and subjects an attorney to discipline.
The basis for this result is
Colo. RPC 8.4(d) (“conduct
that is prejudicial to the administration of justice”).
While Rule 8.4 has a well-deserved reputation
for being the Vise-Grips® of the disciplinary rules—a tool that can get the job
done, but mangles the law in the process—its deployment is entirely apropos in
this instance.
It is not at all
difficult to imagine how rapidly the judicial system would grind to a halt if
the masters of the stenotype machines began to doubt whether they would be
compensated for their efforts when asked to report at the last minute, or work
long nights to provide daily transcripts in cases that last for weeks or
months.
The question posed here is whether a court reporter has
right to additional compensation once the initial transcript have been provided
and paid for? Does a court reporter have
a right to command an additional fee—a sort of perpetual royalty—for copies of
transcripts not provided directly by the reporter? Is there an obligation, ethical or otherwise,
to pay the reporter for these “echoes of reports,” which may, in some cases,
persist for years? May counsel in a case
agree to share deposition transcripts, and/or their costs, on a reciprocal
basis? Here court reporters have not
fared well at all.
You Want a Copy, Right?
Putting ethical issues aside for the moment, a reporter
might instinctively look to the law of copyright to support a claim to a
recurring fee for reproduction of transcripts s/he has created, but there is no
comfort to be found in Title 17 of the U.S. Code. This may seem paradoxical since the
transcript is clearly the reporter’s work product, but the result is consistent
with fundamental copyright principals.
 |
| "I have a dream today" |
Under the Copyright Act, a copyright “subsists . . . in
original works of authorship
fixed in any tangible medium of
expression . . . .”
17U.S.C. §102 (emphasis added).
The
“fixation” requirement is fundamental.
Had Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
I
Have a Dream Speech been completely extemporaneous, or the
Gettysburg Address not been famously
scribbled on the back of an envelope
[1],
neither would be afforded protection under the Copyright Act of 1976.
But what of the filmmakers who recorded Dr.
King’s speech?
Would they not have a
copyright in their audio-visual works?
Of course they would, but not in Dr. King’s text or performance, because
their “work of authorship” pertains exclusively to original art created by their
recordings – principally the framing and editing.
Indeed, absent an available “fair use”
defense, displaying a recording of Dr. King’s famous speech would be mere copyright
infringement, since a recording of the
I
Have a Dream Speech is a derivative work, one of the exclusive rights of
copyright owners.
[2] 17 U.S.C. §106(2).
 |
| Gettysburg Address |
Applying these fundamental copyright principals to the work
product of copyright reporters, it is clear that a reporter may not claim a
copyright in the transcripts of judicial proceedings. Although the reporter unquestionably is responsible
for “fixing” a deposition or hearing “in a tangible media of expression,” it is
not the reporter’s original work of authorship.
The authorship, such as it may exist, belongs to those asking the
questions and providing the answers – and there is some doubt whether even those
participants have any copyright in such recorded proceedings.
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), a case arising out of
the Tenth Circuit, affirmed the long-standing principal that “facts” are not
copyrightable, and that while compilations of facts
may be protected under the Copyright Act, the compiler must display
some minimal level of creativity in the selection and arrangement of facts for
a factual compilation to qualify as original authorship.
A faithfully rendered transcript is merely a
record of the “facts” of a judicial proceeding.
What about the reporter’s index and other inclusions? Feist
rejected the “sweat of the brow” doctrine as a basis for establishing copyright
ownership, requiring at least a modicum of originality, which the work in Feist, an ordinary “White Pages”
telephone directory, lacked[3]. A transcript index, while undeniably useful,
is a mere concordance, insufficiently original or creative to bootstrap into a
claim of copyright ownership by the reporter in the underlying transcript.
What about pagination and line numbering?
Those of us old enough to remember the Super
UBIQ and the WALT II may also recall the epic battle between Lexis and Westlaw
over Westlaw’s claim that it owned a copyright in the pagination of its printed
judicial reports, which were at the time the
de facto, if the not the official, record of judicial decisions in most
jurisdictions as well as the federal courts.
In one of the great blown-calls in the history of copyright law, Judge
James Rosenbaum granted a preliminary injunction to West based on its claim to
a copyright in its pagination.
On a
direct appeal, the Eighth Circuit affirmed, and the Supreme Court refused to
hear the case at that interlocutory stage
[4].
See West Publishing Co. Mead Data Central, Inc.,
616 F. Supp. 1571 (D. Minn. 1985)
, aff’d WestPublishing Co. v. Mead Data Central, Inc., 799 F.2d 1219 (8th Cir. 1986).
 |
| LEXIS' Super
UBIQ |
The stunning result in West
was a dealt a death blow by Feist[5],
and by various state courts which subsequently required, as a condition to
being designated the “official reporter,” that such legal gamesmanship be
foregone.[6] The pagination and line numbering of a court
reporter’s transcript is driven almost entirely by how the page margins are
set. There is simply no originality or
authorship in this.
Confirming that a court reporter does not have a copyright
in transcripts is a
2009 Opinion
of the Tenth Circuit.
There Judges O’Brien,
McConnell, and Tymkovich correctly declined to rule that a court reporter was entitled
to payment for copies of transcripts which an attorney subsequently obtained
through a public records request:
We have found no authority to justify
requiring plaintiffs, and derivatively [their attorney], to pay a fee to a
court reporter for transcript copy the reporter did not make but, rather, that
they legally obtained from another source by independent means. On the contrary, both broad principles and
particular holdings undermine the notion that court reporters may demand a “missed
fee” whenever someone obtains a copy of a transcript that can be traced back to
an original transcript the reporter had made—and was paid for making—for
someone else.
In broad terms, Ms. Bean’s fee claim rests
on the tacit premise that court reporters in some legal sense own the content
of transcripts they prepare, such that they are entitled to remuneration
whenever a copy of a transcript is made (even if they played no role in making
the copy). To accept this premise would
effectively give court reporters a “copyright” in a mere transcription of
others’ statements, contrary to black letter copyright law. See 2 William F. Patry, Patry on Copyright, Ch. 4 Noncopyrightable
Material, § 4.88 (Updated Sept. 2008) (court reporters are not “authors of what
they transcribe and therefore cannot be copyright owners of the transcript of
court proceedings”).
And there is a line of cases holding that
transcripts independently accessed (such as by simply requesting the case file
from the court clerk) may be viewed and copied as an alternative to purchasing
a copy from the court reporter. See Kinan v. City of Brockton, 112
F.R.D. 206, 208 (D. Mass. 1986); Hawley
v. Hall, 131 F.R.D. 578, 583 (D. Nev. 1990); C.P.C. P’ship Bardot Plastics, Inc. v. P.T.R., Inc., 96 F.R.D. 184,
185 (E.D. Pa. 1982); see also Stanley v.
Henderson, 590 F.2d 752, 753 (8th Cir. 1979) (noting counsel may
obtain copies of appeal transcript from clerk); Schroer v. United States, 250 F.R.D. 531, 535-37 (D. Colo. 2008) (rejecting,
under post-2000 Rules . . . [a] party’s effort to require immediate filing of
transcript with clerk to enable informal copying, not because copying is
improper but because party failed to justify burdening the court with filing of
as-yet-unused transcripts). These cases
undercut Ms. Bean’s claim to compensation for transcript copies independently
obtained from the City under New Mexico’s Inspection of Public Records Act.
Court reporters’ efforts to find support for a proprietary
interest in their transcripts under various court rules have been largely
unavailing, while other theories of recovery, such as “theft of services”
statutes, remain untested.
See Mona Savino,
Who Owns the Transcript?, Jrnl. of
Court Reporting (March 2003).
A
recurring theme throughout the decisions, however, is that the courts, while
not unsympathetic towards, and mindful of the need to protect, court reporters
from parsimonious practitioners, justly view transcripts in judicial proceedings
as being affected with a public interest that overrides a reporter’s right to
further, much less perpetual, compensation once the original transcript has
been prepared and paid for.
What’s a Reporter to do?
It is, of course, possible for a court reporter and a lawyer
to agree that the lawyer will purchase all copies of transcripts from the
reporter. Such an agreement would be a simple
requirements contract, the consideration for which may be found in the
reputation of the reporter for speed, accuracy, availability, and the like.
Theory, however, hits the harsh road of reality in a
competitive marketplace, especially with a legally savvy clientele. Unless every court report imposed such contract
terms, any reporter who attempted to do so unilaterally would quickly be in
search of another line of work. Further,
were all reporters to band together to force such requirements agreements on
the bar, antitrust law would quickly put an end to the practice, just as the
Sherman Act did to bar association fee schedules[7]. Moreover, such an attempt to create a “backdoor
copyright,” where no actual copyright exists, would likely support an equitable
defense that such agreements are unenforceable on public policy grounds –
ironically a sort of “copyright misuse” defense, without the copyright.[8]
What is a reporter to do, then? Simple: Provide great service at a fair and
competitive price. As I frequently
counsel my IP clients, legal remedies are vastly overrated compared with market
solutions. A court reporter who provides
good service at a fair price is not likely to be underemployed. Similarly, a reporter who offers to make
bound copies of transcripts speedily available at a fair and competitive
price—competitive with the Kinko’s down the street, this is—is likely to get
the copying business from loyal customers.
Court reporters who feel a sense of entitlement to receive full-freight
for each transcript copy need only study the recent history of the music distribution
business to be persuaded that an all-or-nothing-at-all ultimatum is likely to
lead to nothing at all.
The reward of
the Recording Industry Association of America—which attempted to exact the full
price for each copy of a recorded song by employing a zero-tolerance policy and
employing a legal cudgel against its customers—was to be steamrolled by Apple,
which reinvented the industry, and became the largest distributor of recorded
music in under than 5 years
[9]
as a result of the RIAA’s intransigence.
Court reporters who have been adaptive, offering their clients new and
valuable services, such as electronic transcripts, iPad compatible streaming,
videography, OCRed exhibits, and case repository services, are not sweating
losing out on a few “missed fees” for copies.
As
Princess Leia Organa wisely observed, “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more
star systems will slip through your fingers.”
 |
| “The more you tighten your grip, . . ., the more
star systems will slip through your fingers.” |
Just as my father explained to me as a child that the value received
from eating in a restaurant is not the aggregate cost of the meal’s
ingredients, but rather the service provided, court reporters who market
themselves as law partners offering an array of valuable services, are likely
to earn and retain customer loyalty.
As for “missed fees” for transcript copies, court reporters
would be wise to heed the hard lesson Apple taught the RIAA. Rather than view customers as the “enemy” to
be sued for each perceived infraction, treat such losses as a cost of doing
business and bake them into the price of the initial service; just as Apple
prices the cost of lost royalties from consumer music copying into its standard
rate of $1.29 per song. If court
reporting is viewed and marketed as a service, and not cheapened as the mere
sale of transcripts, overall earnings should rise, provided the service offered
is of high quality and legal consumers perceive it as such.
But What About Ethics?
As bitter a pill as it may be for some court reporters to swallow,
absent a promise not to do so, there is simply nothing unethical about copying
a transcript after the initial transcript has been delivered and paid for; nor
should there be. The Rules of
Professional Conduct are not completely void of political correctness or
financial partisanship and protectionism – the most conspicuous example being
various state IOLTA requirements. But
these should remain the exceptions, rather than the rule.
Court reporter transcripts are undeniably affected with a
public interest. Just as attorneys are, at
least to some measure, servants of the judicial system, so too are those who
faithfully record legal proceedings.
Because the Rules effectively protect reporters against those who would
cheat them of their initial fee, and because it is within the reporter’s power
to price services to account for “missed fees,” reporters cannot fairly
complain that the Rules of Professional Conduct should do more.
[4] An
insider’s account of this litigation is provided by Mark N. Stageberg on his blog.
The parties reportedly settled for a piddling
royalty of $50,000 per year.
[5] See Carl J. Khalil,
Are Page Numbers Really Copyrightable? The Effect of Feist on the West Publishing v.Lexis Case. Mr. Khalil, writing in 1994, holds out some shred
of hope that a copyright might be found in page numbering, which this author
does not share.
Deservedly, West Publishing
has not fared well in subsequent decisions.
See MatthewBender & Co. v. West Publishing Co., 158 F.3d 674 (2d Cir. 1998)
(finding virtually all elements added by West Publishing to reported decisions,
other than its headnotes, syllabus, and key numbers, are unoriginal and therefore
unprotected by copyright); and
Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Co., 158 F.3d 693 (2d Cir. 1998)
(rejecting the Eighth Circuit’s logic in
West Publishing Co. v. Mead Data
Central, Inc., and holding West’s
star pagination lacks sufficient originality to qualify for copyright
protection).
[6]
LEXIS is currently the official reporter for the State of Colorado.
[9]
According to
Wikipedia, “[t]he iTunes Store, originally the iTunes Music Store . . . opened
on April 28, 2003, and has been the largest music vendor in the United States
since April 2008, and the largest music vendor in the world since February
2010.” (footnotes omitted.)
