than this, and that he appropriated such parts of Howell’s books as were the result of the latter’s labor and industry. In Banks v. Manchester, 128 U. S. 244, 9 Sup. Ct. 36, it was held that the reporter of the decisions of a court could not copyright the opinions of the court, or the statements and headnotes of cases as prepared by the court or by any member thereof. But in Callaghan v. Myers, 128 U.S. 617, 645, 650, 9 Sup. Ct. 177, it was held that “the reporter of a volume of law reports can obtain a copyright for it as an author, and that such copyright will cover the parts of the book of which he is the author, although he has no exclusive right in the judicial opinions published”; citing numerous authorities. Upon like grounds we are of opinion that Howell was entitled to have copyrighted his volumes of Annotated Statutes, and that such copyright covers all in his books that may fairly be deemed the result of his labors. Speaking generally, this would include marginal references, notes, memoranda, table of contents, indexes, and digests of judicial decisions prepared by him from original sources of information; also such head-notes as are clearly the result of his labors. We do not perceive any difficulty in holding that his copyright would embrace all such matters, for they constitute no part of that which is public property, and are plainly produced by the compiler. The motion for an injunction was heard in the circuit court upon the evidence furnished by a comparison of the first printed volume of the Miller compilation with Howell’s Annotated Statutes, and by the affidavits of the several defendants. It would have been more satisfactory if the case had gone to a special master for a report as to all those parts of the Miller compilation which were alleged to have been substantially appropriated from Howell’s Annotated Statutes. The court below was left to make such comparison for itself, and the labor required in that way has fallen upon this court. Under ordinary circumstances, we should remand the cause, with directions to send the case to a master, before the application for an injunction was finally disposed of. But we refrain from adopting that course in deference to the suggestion on behalf of the state that the public interests might be injured by any serious delay in determining the case.
Among the affidavits used on the hearing of the application for an injunction was one made by the defendant Miller. It was very full and explicit upon all the material issues made by the pleading. The facts stated by him—using substantially the words of the witness—may be thus summarized: In executing his work as compiler he devised a plan of arrangement of the General Statutes of Michigan then in force which differed in arrangement from former compilations, in that the latter were based upon the Revised Statutes of the state of 1846. He took the statutes in force in 1897, and made an arrangement as if there had been no previous compilation. While the earlier compilations had been subdivided into a large number of titles,—the compilation of 1857 having 40 titles, that of 1871 having 41 titles, and Howell’s Annotated Statutes having 42 titles,—he divided his compilation into only 19 titles or principal subdivisions, as indicated in his report of December 22, 1896, to the governor of the state. In subdividing the titles of his compilation into parts and chapters, no
