This is just one of nine different decisions through which West Publishing Company lost its copyright claims on both the TEXT and the CITATIONS to its National Reporter System.

This was the summary judgment regarding CITATIONS to court decisions.

"After hearing argument on motions for summary judgment, the Court granted the motions of both Matthew Bender and Hyperlaw for summary judgment that their use of references to the particular page in the West reports where a portion of an opinion appeared did not violate West's copyright in the compilation. This is to certify pursuant to Rule 54(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that there is no just reason to delay entry of judgment on this claim and to direct entry of summary judgment on this issue"

--Judge John Martin

On the appeal, West was represented by famous Harvard Law School Professor Arthur R. Miller.

The Second Circuit held:

"The arrangement of cases in the West case reporters, however meticulous and thoughtful, is of small assistance to the primary use of these products--searching for cases, and retrieval. After all, the useful order of access is almost always determined by the research goal of each user rather than the publisher's sequencing (a compilation of law cases being not much like a musical medley or a sonnet sequence). And the primary use of West's pagination in plaintiffs' products is to allow the user to refer to the location of a particular text within the West case reporters as has become standard practice in the legal community. West concedes that use of its volume and page numbers for pinpoint citation purposes is at least a fair use (if it even amounts to actionable copying). There is no evidence that plaintiffs have encouraged the users of their products to reproduce West's arrangement. In fact, the CD-ROM products provide no easy means for using the star pagination to create a substantially similar arrangement; a user must retrieve each case, one at a time, in the order in which they appear in the West volume, [**32]  and then print each one. What customer would want to perform this thankless toil? "