The Construction Specifications Institute, Inc. v Bibliotech Inc. et al., T-2423-24
2025-11-26
Read full decision. Summary prepared by Alan Macek:
The Defendants brought this motion to strike the Fresh as Amended Statement of Claim (“FASOC”) of The Construction Specifications Institute, Inc., without leave to amend, pursuant to Rule 221(1)(a). ... They allege that the Plaintiff has failed to plead with sufficient particularity the material facts to establish its claim, especially by failing to identify any work in which copyright could subsist and by bringing a moral rights claim on behalf of a person incapable of having moral rights in a work. ... As stated above, the lack of precision in the nature of the “work” at issue in this case means that the pleadings in the FASOC have failed to establish a cause of action for copyright infringement. However, I will also address whether copyright could exist in an indexing system or taxonomy, since some of the Plaintiffs’ pleadings have indicated Masterformat is an indexing system ... Teledirect, along with the taxonomy precedents above provides some indication of what is necessary for copyright to subsist in a taxonomy: it must be a way to organize information creatively (not simply alphabetically or chronologically), which is not the only way to represent the idea of that organization, and the copyright of the organization must be analyzed distinctly from the copyright to the work as a whole. The lack of Canadian precedent on taxonomy copyright and minimal precedent on information organization copyright demonstrate the novelty of the Plaintiff’s case. However, while a claim cannot be struck because it is novel, the mere novelty of a claim cannot save pleadings which do not otherwise disclose a reasonable cause of action. (Thanks to John Simpson for a copy of this decision)