The Austrian Supreme Court, after considering a precedent of the German Supreme Court, has held that the publication in a newspaper of a German language translation of a contract originally drafted in English and translated into German with the agreement of the original draftsman constituted infringement of the copyright of the draftsman and the translator. The court distinguished prior decisions holding there to be no copyright in legal documents on the basis that in the prior cases the documents in question had been derived largely from a book of precedents whereas in the present case no such precedent book had been used and that the selection and arrangement of the provisions of the contract were attributable solely to the draftsman. The court also rejected a defense that publication was in the public interest and therefore subject to a fair use-type exemption under copyright law on the grounds that at the time of publication the contract was not "topical" and the relevant parts of it could in any case have been reported without publishing the contract in its entirety.