Telstra Corporation Ltd v Desktop Marketing Systems Pty Ltd was a 2001–2002 case in the Federal Court of Australia in which Telstra successfully argued that its copyright had been infringed by the reproduction of data from the White and Yellow Pages telephone directories in CD-ROM format. It was an important decision in Australian copyright law until the High Court of Australia criticised it in IceTV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd (2009). In 2010, the Federal Court ruled that copyright no longer subsisted in the White or Yellow Pages, effectively overturning the decision. Trial In a decision handed down on 25 May 2001, Finkelstein J reviewed the history of copyright dating back to medieval England. Despite the need to establish authorship and originality, his Honour noted that "an examination of the English cases over the last few hundred years or so shows that in only a few has copyright been denied to a compilation." Although there were "policy reasons both for and against" adopting the United States Supreme Court decision in Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (1991), Finkelstein J considered that he was bound by English authority and could not "jettison the old law and replace it with the principles expressed in Feist." Therefore, copyright subsisted in both the telephone directories and the headings books. Although the information had been reproduced in a different visual format, the differences were not "material" and the substance of the information taken from Telstra's works had been reproduced. Consequences Although privacy issues did not play a part in Finkelstein J's reasoning, the decision had the indirect effect of preventing the publication of reverse telephone directories in Australia. The "Blackpages" service hosted by a group of Australian computer security enthusiasts was taken down shortly after Finkelstein J's decision. Appeal Finkelstein J granted Desktop Marketing Systems leave to appeal to the Full Court. Lindgren J regarded Walter v Lane (1900) as "the high point of the line of authority supportive of the proposition that one can be the 'author' of a work without scope for variance in expression" (ie. creativity). His Honour held that "decisively for the present case, there is no principle that the labour and expense of collecting, verifying, recording and assembling (albeit routinely) data to be compiled are irrelevant to, or are incapable of themselves establishing, origination, and therefore originality." Any departure from the long course of Anglo-Australian