{ Sidenote: Combinations and arrangements}
The copyright under certain categories above scheduled may be in the combination and arrangement only, or it may be also in any original material included with other material. Quantity is not an essential element in copyright so much as "substantial importance." An English court protected a passage of only sixty words.
In respect to advertisements and advertising matter as such, the new American code is silent, and court decisions, mostly English, have been contradictory. In 1863 Vice-Chancellor Page Wood, in Hotten _v._ Arthur, "found no difficulty" in deciding that a catalogue of old books was a subject of copyright "notwithstanding that the catalogues were for the purpose of advertising the plaintiffs' stock-in-trade, and were not in themselves offered for sale"; but in 1872 Lord Romilly, in Cobbett _v._ Woodward, made an absolutely contrary decision, saying: "But at the last, it comes round to this, that there is no copyright in an advertisement. If you copy the advertisement of another, you do him no wrong in doing so, unless you lead the public to believe that you sell the articles of the person whose advertisement you copy." This last decision was definitely overruled and in 1882, in Maple _v._ Junior Army & Navy Stores, the English Court of Appeal, in protecting an advertising catalogue consisting mostly of engravings of furniture, said through Justice Jessel: "The case which has done all the mischief is Cobbett _v._ Woodward.... I think that is not law. I am not aware that the use to which a proprietor puts his book makes any difference in his rights." In 1906, in Davis _v._ Benjamin, the Chancery Division held a sheet of advertising illustrations with headlines and prices a book.
{ Sidenote: Undistinctive advertising not protectable}
An advertisement _per se_ of an ordinary character, the courts may decline to protect, either on behalf of the advertiser or of the publisher of the periodical in which it appears; thus possibly ordinary advertisements might be copied by another paper, to give an inflated impression of its advertising patronage unless enjoined for intent to deceive. On the other hand, characteristic advertisements, as those for which department stores pay large sums to advertisement writers, could doubtless be copyrighted to prevent their use by rival firms, though the advertiser would scarcely be interested in preventing the wide diffusion of his advertisement with his name by its gratuitous publication elsewhere. Some street-car advertisements, however, bear copyright notices. Whether the proprietor of a copyrighted periodical could prevent the use of a copyrightable advertisement not protected by specific copyright, in a rival newspaper, would be questionable, though a publisher might be granted an injunction for the combination or arrangement of copyrightable advertisements in his periodical. In 1892, in Lamb _v._ Evans, Lord Justice Lindley, in the English Court of Appeal, said: "I do not see myself the difficulty in the publisher's having a copyright in a sheet of advertisements. I do see a difficulty in his having a copyright in one advertisement, because, as Mr. Justice Chitty pointed out, that might prevent the advertiser from republishing his advertisements in another paper, which is absurd." An advertisement appearing in several publications, some of them not copyrighted, could only be protected in these latter by specific copyright notice, even though covered in the copyrighted periodicals as a component part. The Copyright Office can make no clear line of demarcation in advance as to advertisements, but it has declined in a recent instance to accept for registry recipes printed on tin and inserted in packages of flour to advertise the flour, which could scarcely be accepted as a "book" or other copyrightable matter.