Soru

In early nineteenth-century Anglo-American jurisprudence, copyright infringement was evaluated almost exclusively through quantitative metrics—specifically, whether a defendant had reprinted an entire work or an unabridged substantial volume without authorization. Courts operated under the assumption that non-verbatim abridgments or contextual quotations constituted independent, lawful intellectual creations, provided the secondary author expended genuine interpretive labor. This rigid framework was fundamentally altered by the 1841 judicial decision in Folsom v. Marsh. Tasked with determining whether a biographer had infringed upon a multi-volume compilation of George Washington's writings by reproducing 353 pages of correspondence (amounting to less than four percent of the plaintiff's total text), Justice Joseph Story rejected the notion that non-infringement could be established merely by demonstrating that the copied portion represented a numerically minor fraction of the original. Instead, Story articulated a qualitative standard, asserting that judicial scrutiny must examine the nature, value, and character of the selected excerpts. He reasoned that extracting the essential "vital materials" or intellectual core of a work, even in small amounts, could supersede the market demand for the original and unfairly diminish an author's economic incentive.

Which one of the following assertions regarding judicial evaluation of copyright disputes prior to the Folsom v. Marsh decision is most strongly supported by the passage?