Whether the court of appeals correctly interpreted copyright protection for an author's arrangement of words

Whether the court of appeals departed from this Court ’s decision that an author ’s arrangement of words is protectible: The right thus secured by the copyright act is not a right to the use of certain words, because they are the common property of the human race, and are as little susceptible of private appropriation as air or sunlight; nor is it the right to ideas alone, since in the absence of means of communicating them they are of value to no one but the author. But the right is to that arrangement of words which the author has selected to express his ideas. Or, as Lord Mansfield describes it, ‘an incorporeal right to print a set of intellectual ideas, or modes of thinking, communicated in a set of words or sentences, and modes of expression. It is equally detached from the manuscript, or any other physical existence whatsoever. ’ 4 Burrows, 2396. Holmes v. Hurst. 174 U.S. 82 (1899).