Managers and the Legal Environment 7th Edition by David Madsen, Constance Bagley

Exercise 2

FairTest, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving standardization tests, posted data on its website that demonstrated that minorities and low-income students score lower on the SAT and ACT than white and upperclass students. The College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SAT, demanded that FairTest remove the data, claiming that it was using College Board copyrighted data without permission. The College Board has a formal process by which it grants permission to organizations wishing to use its data; FairTest did not use this process. In reply, FairTest alleged that the data were not owned by the College Board and that, even if they were, the data are widely available in the public domain, thus removing them from copyright protection. Does FairTest's defense have merit? [See http://www.chillingeffects.org/responses/ notice.cgi?NoticeID=1519; http://www.susanohanian.org/ show_atrocities.php?id=3323.]