An Introduction to AuthoritySpoke

“Details, unnumbered, shifting, sharp, disordered, unchartable, jagged.”

Karl N. Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study (1930).

AuthoritySpoke is a Python package that will help you make legal authority readable by computers.

This notebook will provide an overview of AuthoritySpoke’s most important features. AuthoritySpoke is still in an alpha state, so many features have yet to be implemented, and some others still have limited functionality.

AuthoritySpoke is open source software (as well as Ethical Source software). That mean you have the opportunity to reuse AuthoritySpoke in your own projects. You can also participate in its development by submitting issues, bug reports, and pull requests.

Getting Example Data

AuthoritySpoke helps you work with three kinds of data: court opinions, legislative enactments, and structured annotations of legal procedural rules.

To help you obtain court opinions, AuthoritySpoke provides an interface to the Caselaw Access Project API, a project of the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab. You’ll need to register for an API key.

To provide you with legislation text, AuthoritySpoke imports the Legislice Python package, which provides an interface to the Legislice API at authorityspoke.com. This API currently provides access to recent versions of the United States Code, plus the United States Constitution. You’ll need to sign up for an account and then obtain a Legislice API key from your account page. The Legislice API key is not the same as the Caselaw Access Project API key.

As of version 0.4, you mostly have to create your own procedural rule annotations, but the example_data folder of the GitHub repository for AuthoritySpoke contains example annotations for several cases. The rest of this tutorial depends on having access to the example_data folder, so if you’re running the tutorial code interactively, you’ll need to either clone the AuthoritySpoke repository to your computer and run the tutorial from there, or else run the tutorial from a cloud environment like Binder. If you’ve installed AuthoritySpoke and you need access to the example data files, you’ll need to download them from the GitHub repository.

Importing the Package

If you want to use AuthoritySpoke in your own Python environment, be sure you have installed AuthoritySpoke using a command like pip install AuthoritySpoke on the command line. Visit the Python Package Index for more details.

With a Python environment activated, let’s import AuthoritySpoke by running the cell below. If you’re running this code on your own machine but you don’t want to obtain API keys or make real API calls over the Internet, you can change the two True variables to False to use fake versions of the APIs.

import authorityspoke

USE_REAL_CASE_API = True
USE_REAL_LEGISLICE_API = True

If you executed that cell with no error messages, then it worked!

If you got a message like No module named 'authorityspoke', then AuthoritySpoke is probably not installed in your current Python environment. In that case, check the Python documentation for help on installing modules.

Optional: Skip the Downloads and Load Decisions from a File

To use the cell below to access Decision objects from a file rather than an API, be sure the USE_REAL_CASE_API variable is set to False. This should work if you’re running the tutorial in a notebook in a cloud environment like Binder, or if you’ve cloned AuthoritySpoke’s GitHub repository to your hard drive and you’re using jupyter to run the tutorial in from the notebooks folder of the repository. The notebook will try to find the data for the fake APIs in the example_data folder alongside a notebooks folder where this notebook is running.

from authorityspoke.io.loaders import load_decision
from authorityspoke.io.readers import read_decision

if not USE_REAL_CASE_API:

    oracle_download = load_decision("oracle_h.json")
    lotus_download = load_decision("lotus_h.json")

Downloading and Importing Decisions

If you didn’t load court opinions from the GitHub repository as described in section 1.1, then you’ll be using the Caselaw Access Project (CAP) API to get court opinions to load into AuthoritySpoke. To download full cases from CAP, you’ll need to register for a CAP API key.

One good way to use an API key in a Jupyter Notebook or other Python working file is to save the API key in a file called .env. The .env file should contain a line that looks like CAP_API_KEY=your-api-key-here. Then you can use the dotenv Python package to load the API key as an environment variable without ever writing the API key in the notebook. That makes it easier to keep your API key secret, even if you publish your copy of the notebook and make it visible on the internet.

However, if you’re viewing this tutorial in a cloud environment like Binder, you probably won’t be able to create an environment variable. Instead, you could replace os.getenv('CAP_API_KEY') with a string containing your own API key.

import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv
load_dotenv()

CAP_API_KEY = os.getenv('CAP_API_KEY')

Next we need to download some cases for analysis.

The CAP API limits users to downloading 500 full cases per day. If you accidentally make a query that returns hundreds of full cases, you could hit your limit before you know it. You should first try out your API queries without the "full_case": "true" parameter, and then only request full cases once you’re confident you’ll receive what you expect.

Let’s download Oracle America v. Google, 750 F.3d 1339 (2014), a landmark opinion in which the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals held that the interface of the Java language was copyrightable. And since we’ll want to compare the Oracle case to a related case, let’s also download Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International, 49 F.3d 807 (1995). In that case, the First Circuit Court of Appeals held that the menu structure of a spreadsheet program called Lotus 1-2-3 was uncopyrightable because it was a “method of operation” under the Copyright Act. As we’ll see, the Oracle case discusses and disagrees with the Lotus case.

If you already loaded an Opinion from a file, running the cells below with USE_REAL_CASE_API set to True will attempt to overwrite them with data from the API. You should be able to run the rest of the tutorial code either way.

from authorityspoke.io.downloads import download_case
from authorityspoke.io.loaders import load_and_read_decision

if USE_REAL_CASE_API:
    oracle_download = download_case(cite="750 F.3d 1339")

Now we have a record representing the Oracle case, which can also be found in the “example_data/opinions” folder under the filename “oracle_h.json”. Let’s look at a field from the API response.

>>> oracle_download["name"]
'ORACLE AMERICA, INC., Plaintiff-Appellant, v. GOOGLE INC., Defendant-Cross-Appellant'

Yes, this is the correct case name. But if we had provided the API key and used the full_case flag, we could have received more information, like whether there are any non-majority opinions in the case, and the names of the opinion authors. So let’s request the Oracle case with full_case=True.

if USE_REAL_CASE_API:
    oracle_download = download_case(
    cite="750 F.3d 1339",
    full_case=True,
    api_key=CAP_API_KEY)

And then do the same for the Lotus case.

if USE_REAL_CASE_API:
    lotus_download = download_case(
    cite="49 F.3d 807",
    full_case=True,
    api_key=CAP_API_KEY)

Now let’s convert the Oracle API response to an AuthoritySpoke object.

>>> from authorityspoke.io.readers import read_decision
>>> oracle = read_decision(oracle_download)

And take a look at the object we made.

>>> print(oracle)
Oracle America, Inc. v. Google Inc., 750 F.3d 1339 (2014-05-09)

>>> lotus = read_decision(lotus_download)
>>> print(lotus)
Lotus Development Corp. v. Borland International, Inc., 49 F.3d 807 (1995-03-09)

One judicial Decision can include multiple Opinions. The Lotus Decision has a concurring opinion as well as a majority opinion. Access the majority attribute of the Decision object to get the majority opinion.

>>> print(lotus.majority)
majority Opinion by STAHL, Circuit Judge.

Downloading Enactments

The interface for downloading legislation is a little different. First you create a Client class that holds your API key. Then you can use the legislice.download.Client.fetch() method to fetch JSON representing the provision at a specified citation on a specified date (or the most recent version, if you don’t specify a date). Or you can use legislice.download.Client.read(), which also fetches the JSON but then loads it into an instance of the Enactment class.

from authorityspoke.io.downloads import Client, FakeClient

if USE_REAL_LEGISLICE_API:

    LEGISLICE_API_TOKEN = os.getenv("LEGISLICE_API_TOKEN")
    legis_client = Client(api_token=LEGISLICE_API_TOKEN)

else:
    legis_client = FakeClient.from_file("usc.json")

Linking Holdings to Opinions

If you want annotation anchors to link each Holding to a passage in an Opinion, you can use the load_holdings_with_anchors() method. The result is type of NamedTuple called AnchoredHoldings. You can pass this NamedTuple as the only argument to the authorityspoke.decisions.Decision.posit() method to assign the Holdings to the majority Opinion of a Decision. This will also link the correct text passages from the Opinion to each Holding.

>>> from authorityspoke.io.loaders import load_holdings_with_anchors
>>> oracle_holdings_with_anchors = load_holdings_with_anchors("holding_oracle.json", client=legis_client)
>>> lotus_holdings_with_anchors = load_holdings_with_anchors("holding_lotus.json", client=legis_client)
>>> oracle.posit(oracle_holdings_with_anchors)
>>> lotus.posit(lotus_holdings_with_anchors)

You can pass either one Holding or a list of Holdings to authorityspoke.decisions.Decision.posit(). The posit() method also has a text_links parameter that takes a dict indicating what text spans in the Opinion should be linked to which Holding.

Viewing an Opinion’s Holdings

If you take a look in holding_oracle.json in AuthoritySpoke’s git repository, you’ll see that it would be loaded in Python as a list of 20 dicts, each representing a holding. (In case you aren’t familiar with how Python handles JSON, the outer square brackets represent the beginning and end of the list. The start and end of each dict in the list is shown by a matched pair of curly brackets.)

Let’s make sure that the posit() method linked all of those holdings to our oracle Opinion object.

>>> len(oracle.holdings)
20

Now let’s see the string representation of the AuthoritySpoke Holding object we created from the structured JSON we saw above.

>>> print(oracle.holdings[0])
the Holding to ACCEPT
  the Rule that the court MUST SOMETIMES impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact it is false that <the Java API> was copyrightable
    GIVEN:
      the Fact it is false that <the Java API> was an original work
    GIVEN the ENACTMENT:
      "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)

Instead of the terms “inputs” and “outputs” we saw in the JSON file, we now have “GIVEN” and “RESULT”. And the “RESULT” comes first, because it’s hard to understand anything else about a legal rule until you understand what it does. Also, notice the separate heading “GIVEN the ENACTMENT”. This indicates that the existence of statutory text (or another kind of enactment such as a constitution) can also be a precondition for a Rule to apply. So the two preconditions that must be present to apply this Rule are “the Fact it is false that the Java API was an original work” and the statutory text creating copyright protection.

It’s also important to notice that a Rule can be purely hypothetical from the point of view of the Opinion that posits it. In this case, the court finds that there would be a certain legal significance if it was “GIVEN” that it is false that <the Java API> was an original work, but the court isn’t going to find that precondition applies, so it’s also not going to accept the “RESULT” that it is false that <the Java API> was copyrightable.

We can also access just the inputs of a Holding, just the Enactments, etc.

>>> print(oracle.holdings[0].inputs[0])
the Fact it is false that <the Java API> was an original work

>>> print(oracle.holdings[0].enactments[0])
"Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)

Generic Factors

The two instances of the phrase “the Java API” are in angle brackets to indicate that the Java API is a generic Entity mentioned in the Fact.

>>> oracle.holdings[0].generic_factors
[Entity(name='the Java API', generic=True, plural=False, anchors=[])]

A generic Entity is “generic” in the sense that in the context of the Factor where the Entity appears, it could be replaced with some other generic Entity without changing the meaning of the Factor or the Rule where it appears.

Let’s illustrate this idea with the first holding from the Lotus case.

>>> print(lotus.holdings[0])
the Holding to ACCEPT that the EXCLUSIVE way to reach the fact that
<Borland International> infringed the copyright in <the Lotus menu
command hierarchy> is
  the Rule that the court MAY SOMETIMES impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact that <Borland International> infringed the copyright in <the
      Lotus menu command hierarchy>
    GIVEN:
      the Fact that <the Lotus menu command hierarchy> was copyrightable
      the Fact that <Borland International> copied constituent elements of
      <the Lotus menu command hierarchy> that were original
    GIVEN the ENACTMENT:
      "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)

What if we wanted to generalize this Holding about copyright and apply it in a different context, such as a case about books or television shows instead of computer programs? First we could look at the “generic” Factors of the Holding, which were marked off in angle brackets in the string representation of the Holding.

>>> lotus.holdings[0].generic_factors
[Entity(name='Borland International', generic=True, plural=False, anchors=[]),
Entity(name='the Lotus menu command hierarchy', generic=True, plural=False, anchors=[])]

The same Rules and Holdings may be relevant to more than one Opinion. Let’s try applying the idea from lotus.holdings[0] to a different copyright case that’s also about a derivative work. In Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group Inc. (1998), a United States Court of Appeals found that a publisher infringed the copyright in the sitcom Seinfeld by publishing a trivia book called SAT: The Seinfeld Aptitude Test.

Maybe we’d like to see how the Holding from the Lotus case could have applied in the context of the Castle Rock Entertainment case, under 17 USC 102. We can check that by using the new_context() method to replace the generic factors from the Lotus Holding. One way to do this is by passing a tuple containing a list of factors that need to be replaced, followed by a list of their replacements.

>>> from authorityspoke import Entity
>>> seinfeld_holding = lotus.holdings[0].new_context(
    terms_to_replace=[
            Entity("Borland International"),
            Entity("the Lotus menu command hierarchy"),
        ],
    changes=[Entity("Carol Publishing Group"), Entity("Seinfeld")]
)

The new_context() method returns a new Holding object, which we’ve assigned to the name seinfeld_holding, but the Holding that we used as a basis for the new object also still exists, and it’s unchanged.

>>> print(seinfeld_holding)
the Holding to ACCEPT
  the Rule that the court MAY SOMETIMES impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact that <Carol Publishing Group> infringed the copyright in
      <Seinfeld>
    GIVEN:
      the Fact that <Seinfeld> was copyrightable
      the Fact that <Carol Publishing Group> copied constituent elements of
      <Seinfeld> that were original
    GIVEN the ENACTMENT:
      "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)

Even though these Holdings have different generic factors and don’t evaluate equal to one another, the means() method shows that they have the same meaning. In other words, they both endorse exactly the same legal Rule. If Holding A means() Holding B, then Holding A also necessarily implies() Holding B.

>>> lotus.holdings[0] == seinfeld_holding
False

>>> lotus.holdings[0].means(seinfeld_holding)
True

Enactment Objects and Implication

Sometimes it’s useful to know whether one Rule or Holding implies another. Basically, one legal Holding implies() a second Holding if its meaning entirely includes the meaning of the second Holding. To illustrate this idea, let’s look at the Enactment that needs to be present to support the Holding at oracle.holdings[0].

>>> copyright_provision = oracle.holdings[0].enactments[0]
>>> print(copyright_provision)
"Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)

The Enactment object refers to part of the text of subsection 102(a) from Title 17 of the United States Code.

Next, let’s create a new Enactment object representing a shorter passage of text from the same provision. We select some text from the provision by calling the select() method with the string “Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship”, which exactly matches some text that can be found in subsection 102(a).

>>> from authorityspoke import Enactment
>>> from anchorpoint import TextQuoteSelector
works_of_authorship_passage = (
    "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, "
    + "in original works of authorship"
)
works_of_authorship_clause = legis_client.read("/us/usc/t17/s102/a")
works_of_authorship_clause.select(works_of_authorship_passage)

Now we can create a new Holding object that cites to our new Enactment object rather than the old one. This time, instead of using the new_context() method to create a new Holding object, we’ll use Python’s built-in deepcopy() function. This method gives us an identical copy of the Holding that we can change without changing the original. Then we can use the set_enactments() method to change what Enactment is cited by the new Holding.

>>> from copy import deepcopy
>>> holding_with_shorter_enactment = deepcopy(oracle.holdings[0])
>>> holding_with_shorter_enactment.set_enactments(works_of_authorship_clause)
>>> print(holding_with_shorter_enactment)
the Holding to ACCEPT
  the Rule that the court MUST SOMETIMES impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact it is false that <the Java API> was copyrightable
    GIVEN:
      the Fact it is false that <the Java API> was an original work
    GIVEN the ENACTMENT:
      "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)

Now let’s try comparing this new Holding with the real Holding from the Oracle case, to see whether one implies() the other. When you’re comparing AuthoritySpoke objects, the greater than sign > means “implies, but is not equal to”.

>>> holding_with_shorter_enactment > oracle.holdings[0]
True

You can also use the greater than or equal sign >= to mean “implies or is equal to”. You can also use lesser than signs to test whether an object on the right side of the expression implies the object on the left. Thus, <= would mean “is implied by or is equal to”.

>>> holding_with_shorter_enactment <= oracle.holdings[0]
False

By comparing the string representations of the original Holding from the Oracle case and holding_with_shorter_enactment, can you tell why the latter implies the former, and not the other way around?

If you guessed that it was because holding_with_shorter_enactment has a shorter Enactment, you’re right. A Rule that requires fewer, or less specific, inputs is broader than a Rule that has more inputs, because there’s a larger set of situations where the Rule can be triggered.

If this relationship isn’t clear to you, imagine some “Enactment A” containing only a subset of the text of “Enactment B”, and then imagine what would happen if a legislature amended some of the statutory text that was part of Enactment B but not of Enactment A. A requirement to cite Enactment B would no longer be possible to satisfy, because some of that text would no longer be available. Thus a requirement to cite Enactment A could be satisfied in every situation where a requirement to cite Enactment B could be satisfied, and then some.

Checking for Contradictions

Let’s turn back to the Lotus case.

It says that under a statute providing that “In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any…method of operation”, the fact that a Lotus menu command hierarchy was a “method of operation” meant that it was also uncopyrightable, despite a couple of Facts that might tempt some courts to rule the other way.

>>> print(lotus.holdings[6])
the Holding to ACCEPT
  the Rule that the court MUST ALWAYS impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact it is false that <the Lotus menu command hierarchy> was
      copyrightable
    GIVEN:
      the Fact that <the Lotus menu command hierarchy> was a method of
      operation
    DESPITE:
      the Fact that a text described <the Lotus menu command hierarchy>
      the Fact that <the Lotus menu command hierarchy> was an original work
    GIVEN the ENACTMENT:
      "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any…method of operation…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/b 2013-07-18)

Lotus was a case relied upon by Google in the Oracle v. Google case, but Oracle was the winner in that decision. So we might wonder whether the Oracle majority opinion contradicts() the Lotus majority opinion. Let’s check.

>>> oracle.contradicts(lotus)
True

That’s good to know, but we don’t want to take it on faith that a contradiction exists. Let’s use the explain_contradiction() method to find the contradictory Holdings posited by the Oracle and Lotus cases, and to generate a rudimentary explanation of why they contradict.

>>> explanation = lotus.explain_contradiction(oracle)
>>> print(explanation)
EXPLANATION: Because <the Lotus menu command hierarchy> is like <the Java API>,
  the Holding to ACCEPT
    the Rule that the court MUST ALWAYS impose the
      RESULT:
        the Fact it is false that <the Lotus menu command hierarchy> was
        copyrightable
      GIVEN:
        the Fact that <the Lotus menu command hierarchy> was a method of
        operation
      DESPITE:
        the Fact that a text described <the Lotus menu command hierarchy>
        the Fact that <the Lotus menu command hierarchy> was an original work
      GIVEN the ENACTMENT:
        "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any…method of operation…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/b 2013-07-18)
CONTRADICTS
  the Holding to ACCEPT
    the Rule that the court MUST SOMETIMES impose the
      RESULT:
        the Fact that <the Java API> was copyrightable
      GIVEN:
        the Fact that <the Java language> was a computer program
        the Fact that <the Java API> was a set of application programming
        interface declarations
        the Fact that <the Java API> was an original work
        the Fact that <the Java API> was a non-literal element of <the Java
        language>
        the Fact that <the Java API> was the expression of an idea
        the Fact it is false that <the Java API> was essentially the only way
        to express the idea that it embodied
        the Fact that <the Java API> was creative
        the Fact that it was possible to use <the Java language> without
        copying <the Java API>
      DESPITE:
        the Fact that <the Java API> was a method of operation
        the Fact that <the Java API> contained short phrases
        the Fact that <the Java API> became so popular that it was the
        industry standard
        the Fact that there was a preexisting community of programmers
        accustomed to using <the Java API>
      GIVEN the ENACTMENT:
        "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)
      DESPITE the ENACTMENTS:
        "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any…method of operation…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/b 2013-07-18)
        "The following are examples of works not subject to copyright and applications for registration of such works cannot be entertained: Words and short phrases such as names, titles, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering or coloring; mere listing of ingredients or contents; Ideas, plans, methods, systems, or devices, as distinguished from the particular manner in which they are expressed or described in a writing;  Blank forms, such as time cards, graph paper, account books, diaries, bank checks, scorecards, address books, report forms, order forms and the like, which are designed for recording information and do not in themselves convey information; Works consisting entirely of information that is common property containing no original authorship, such as, for example: Standard calendars, height and weight charts, tape measures and rulers, schedules of sporting events, and lists or tables taken from public documents or other common sources. Typeface as typeface." (/us/cfr/t37/s202.1 1992-02-21)

That’s a really complicated holding! Good thing we have AuthoritySpoke to help us grapple with it.

We can use the explain_contradiction() method directly on a Holding to generate all available Explanations of why a contradiction is possible between lotus.holdings[6] and oracle.holdings[10]. Each Explanation includes a mapping that shows how the context factors of the Holding on the left can be mapped onto the Holding on the right. The explanation we’ve already been given is that these two Holdings contradict each other if you consider ‘the Lotus menu command hierarchy’ to be analagous to ‘the Java API’. The other possible explanation AuthoritySpoke could have given would have been that ‘the Lotus menu command hierarchy’ is analagous to ‘the Java language’. Let’s see if the other possible Explanation also appears in explanations.

>>> explanations = list(lotus.holdings[6].explanations_contradiction(oracle.holdings[10]))
>>> len(explanations)
1

No, there’s only one Explanation given for how these rules can contradict each other. (The explain_contradiction() method returns only one one Explanation, but explanations_contradiction() is a generator that yields every Explanation it can find.) If you read the Oracle case, is makes sense that ‘the Lotus menu command hierarchy’ is not considered analagous to ‘the Java language’. The Oracle case is only about infringing the copyright in the Java API, not the copyright in the whole Java language. A statement about infringement of ‘the Java language’ would be irrelevant, not contradictory.

But what exactly is the contradiction between the two Holdings?

The first obvious contrast between lotus.holdings[6] and oracle.holdings[10] is that the Holding from the Lotus case is relatively succinct and categorical. The Lotus court interprets Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act to mean that if a work is a “method of operation”, it’s simply impossible for that work to be copyrighted, so it’s not necessary to consider a lot of case-specific facts to reach a conclusion.

The Federal Circuit’s Oracle decision complicates that view significantly. The Federal Circuit believes that the fact that an API is, or hypothetically might be, a “method of operation” is only one of many factors that a court can consider in deciding copyrightability. The following quotation, repeated in the Oracle case, illustrates the Federal Circuit’s view.

“Section 102(b) does not extinguish the protection accorded a particular expression of an idea merely because that expression is embodied in a method of operation.” Mitel, Inc. v. Iqtel, Inc., 124 F.3d 1366, 1372 (10th Cir.1997)

And that’s why AuthoritySpoke finds a contradiction between these two Rules. The Oracle opinion says that courts can sometimes accept the result the Fact that <the Java API> was copyrightable despite the Fact <the Java API> was a method of operation. The Lotus Opinion would consider that impossible.

By the way, AuthoritySpoke does not draw on any Natural Language Understanding technologies to determine the meaning of each Fact. AuthoritySpoke mostly won’t recognize that Facts have the same meaning unless their content values are exactly the same string. As discussed above, they can also differ in their references to generic factors, which are the phrases that appear in brackets when you use the str() command on them. Also, AuthoritySpoke has a limited ability to compare numerical statements in Facts using pint, an amazing Python library that performs dimensional analysis.

Adding Holdings to One Another

To try out the addition operation, let’s load another case from the example_data folder.

>>> feist = load_and_read_decision("feist_h.json")
>>> feist.posit(load_holdings_with_anchors("holding_feist.json", client=legis_client))

Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. was a case that held that the listings in a telephone directory did not qualify as “an original work” and that only original works are eligible for protection under the Copyright Act. This is a two-step analysis.

The first step results in the Fact it is false that a generic Entity was “an original work”:

>>> print(feist.holdings[10])
the Holding to ACCEPT
  the Rule that the court MAY SOMETIMES impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact it is false that <Rural's telephone listings> were an
      original work
    GIVEN:
      the Fact that <Rural's telephone listings> were names, towns, and
      telephone numbers of telephone subscribers
    GIVEN the ENACTMENTS:
      "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors…the exclusive Right to their respective Writings…" (/us/const/article/I/8/8 1788-09-13)
      "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)
      "The copyright in a compilation…extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material.…" (/us/usc/t17/s103/b 2013-07-18)

And the second step relies on the result of the first step to reach the further result of “absence of the Fact that” a generic Entity was “copyrightable”.

>>> print(feist.holdings[3])
the Holding to ACCEPT that the EXCLUSIVE way to reach the fact that
<Rural's telephone directory> was copyrightable is
  the Rule that the court MAY SOMETIMES impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact that <Rural's telephone directory> was copyrightable
    GIVEN:
      the Fact that <Rural's telephone directory> was an original work
    GIVEN the ENACTMENTS:
      "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors…the exclusive Right to their respective Writings…" (/us/const/article/I/8/8 1788-09-13)
      "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)

In this situation, anytime the first Holding (feist.holdings[10]) is applied, the second Holding (feist.holdings[3]) can be applied as well. That means the two Holdings can be __add__()ed together to make a single Holding that captures the whole process.

>>> listings_not_copyrightable = feist.holdings[10] + feist.holdings[3]
>>> print(listings_not_copyrightable)
the Holding to ACCEPT
  the Rule that the court MAY SOMETIMES impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact it is false that <Rural's telephone listings> were an
      original work
      absence of the Fact that <Rural's telephone listings> were
      copyrightable
    GIVEN:
      the Fact that <Rural's telephone listings> were names, towns, and
      telephone numbers of telephone subscribers
    GIVEN the ENACTMENTS:
      "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors…the exclusive Right to their respective Writings…" (/us/const/article/I/8/8 1788-09-13)
      "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)
      "The copyright in a compilation…extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material.…" (/us/usc/t17/s103/b 2013-07-18)

The difference between feist.holdings[10] and the newly-created Holding listings_not_copyrightable is that listings_not_copyrightable has two Factors under its “RESULT”, not just one. Notice that it doesn’t matter that the two original Holdings reference different generic Entity objects (“Rural’s telephone directory” versus “Rural’s telephone listings”). Because they’re generic, they’re interchangeable for this purpose.

You might recall that oracle.holdings[0] also was also about the relationship between originality and copyrightability. Let’s see what happens when we add oracle.holdings[0] to feist.holdings[10].

>>> print(feist.holdings[10] + oracle.holdings[0])
None

Can you guess why it’s not possible to add these two Holdings together? Here’s a hint:

>>> feist.holdings[10].exclusive
False
>>> oracle.holdings[0].exclusive
False
>>> feist.holdings[3].exclusive
True

feist.holdings[10] and oracle.holdings[0] are both Holdings that purport to apply in only “SOME” cases where the specified inputs are present, while feist.holdings[3] purports to be the “EXCLUSIVE” way to reach its output, which indicates a statement about “ALL” cases.

You can’t infer that there’s any situation where feist.holdings[10] and oracle.holdings[0] can actually be applied together, because there might not be any overlap between the “SOME” cases where one applies and the “SOME” cases where the other applies. But if feist.holdings[10] and feist.holdings[3] are both valid law, then we know they can both apply together in any of the “SOME” cases where feist.holdings[10] applies.

Set Operations with Holdings

In AuthoritySpoke, the __or__() operator (the | symbol) is an alias for the union() operation. This operation is different from the __add__() operation, and it usually gives different results.

>>> result_of_adding = feist.holdings[10] + feist.holdings[3]
>>> result_of_union = feist.holdings[10] | feist.holdings[3]
>>> result_of_adding == result_of_union
False

Although the existence of the union() operation might suggest that there should also be an intersection operation, an intersection operation is not yet implemented in AuthoritySpoke 0.4.

Apply the union() operator to two Holdings to get a new Holding with all of the inputs and all of the outputs of both of the two original Holdings. However, you only get such a new Holding if it can be inferred by accepting the truth of the two original Holdings. If self contradicts() other, the operation returns None. Likewise, if the two original Holdings both have the value False for the parameter universal, the operation will return None if it’s possible that the “SOME” cases where one of the original Holdings applies don’t overlap with the “SOME” cases where the other applies.

In this example, we’ll look at a Holding from Oracle, then a Holding from Feist, and then the union() of both of them.

>>> print(oracle.holdings[1])
the Holding to ACCEPT
  the Rule that the court MUST ALWAYS impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact that <the Java API> was an original work
    GIVEN:
      the Fact that <the Java API> was independently created by the author,
      as opposed to copied from other works
      the Fact that <the Java API> possessed at least some minimal degree of
      creativity
    GIVEN the ENACTMENT:
      "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)

>>> print(feist.holdings[2])
the Holding to ACCEPT
  the Rule that the court MUST ALWAYS impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact it is false that <Rural's telephone directory> was
      copyrightable
    GIVEN:
      the Fact that <Rural's telephone directory> was an idea
    GIVEN the ENACTMENT:
      "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors…the exclusive Right to their respective Writings…" (/us/const/article/I/8/8 1788-09-13)

>>> print(oracle.holdings[1] | feist.holdings[2])
the Holding to ACCEPT
  the Rule that the court MUST ALWAYS impose the
    RESULT:
      the Fact it is false that <the Java API> was copyrightable
      the Fact that <the Java API> was an original work
    GIVEN:
      the Fact that <the Java API> was an idea
      the Fact that <the Java API> possessed at least some minimal degree of
      creativity
      the Fact that <the Java API> was independently created by the author,
      as opposed to copied from other works
    GIVEN the ENACTMENTS:
      "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors…the exclusive Right to their respective Writings…" (/us/const/article/I/8/8 1788-09-13)
      "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.…" (/us/usc/t17/s102/a 2013-07-18)

It’s not obvious that a litigant could really establish all the “GIVEN” Factors listed above in a single case in a court where oracle.holdings[1] and feist.holdings[2] were both valid law, but if they could, then it seems correct for AuthoritySpoke to conclude that the court would have to find both the Fact that <the Java API> was an original work and the Fact it is false that <the Java API> was copyrightable.

The union() operator is useful for searching for contradictions in a collection of Holdings. When two Holdings are combined together with the union operator, their union might contradict other Holdings that neither of the two original Holdings would have contradicted on their own.