From the Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/28/1072546412045.html

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It's your number, but their earner

By Wendy Frew  December 29, 2003


You can give your phone number to anyone you please - but only one company can make money out of the names and addresses of all Australians.

Telstra's fight to keep it that way came to Sydney last week when it reached an out-of-court settlement with a small directory business, Dependable Database Data (DDD).

US courts require proof of creativity to grant copyright, but Australia's telephony goliath has had to spend up big in the courts in recent years to establish control over its White Pages and Yellow Pages.

In the process, it has put several small companies out of business, including one that hired a team in the Philippines to key in the numbers from every Telstra phone book in Australia.

"The main thing out of this is that we will not stand by and let anyone copy our work," said Karina White, a spokeswoman for the Telstra subsidiary Sensis, which runs the Yellow Pages and White Pages.

"The amount of hours and manpower that goes into building our directories . . . is fairly extensive, so we want to protect them."

Earlier this year Telstra won a four-year-long case against another company, Victoria's Desktop Marketing Systems, when it was ruled that phone number listings attract copyright on a "sweat of the brow" basis - the effort and expense of compiling them.

Telstra had also taken action against DDD, which supplied the basic data for Desktop Marketing and ran an internet-based competitor to Telstra called the Green Pages. DDD's owner, Robert Rosengreen, said yesterday that he knew when Desktop Marketing lost its case that it would be difficult for him to continue with his 15-year-old business.

"No decision has been made yet but DDD is a company with one major product and if that product can't be issued, we can't continue," Mr Rosengreen said.

"It also makes it very difficult to fight a big company."

The company's Australia On Disc contains about 8 million Australian business and home names, addresses and telephone numbers.

Sensis and DDD have not revealed the details of the settlement, but DDD has agreed, without admission, to stop distributing its Australia On Disc and Green Pages products in Australia.

Does that leave Telstra with a valuable monopoly?

Sensis's Ms White said there was nothing stopping people from building their own databases.

But that might require them doorknocking every home in Sydney and beyond to get their numbers.

"What it stops them from doing is using the information we have collected," Ms White said.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/28/1072546412045.html