A full bench ruling by the Federal Court affirmed an earlier judicial decision that effectively stripped Telstra Corporation-subsidiary Sensis the right to exclusively own and publish the telco's telephone directories' contents.

Chief Justice Patrick Keane announced on Wednesday the court's reportedly unanimous ruling, which upheld the February ruling this year of Justice Michelle Gordon that states Yellow Pages and White Pages could not be protected by copyright laws since they are not the product of intellectual efforts and instead were largely constituted by computer-aided works.

According to the decision released by the Federal Court, Chief Justice Keane argued that information contained in the phone directories could not be protected by copyright laws as they were published mostly aided by computer software.

He further reasoned that "the principal contention of the respondents (Phone Directories) is that the directories were compiled, not by the individuals engaged to facilitate the process, but by a computerised process of storing, selecting, ordering and arranging the data to produce the directories in the form in which they were published."

The originating case stemmed from Telstra's lawsuit against Phone Directories Company, which the telco claimed had lifted information from directories published by Sensis but that contention has been hosed down by the court's decision, in which Chief Justice Keane stressed that "the principal contention of the respondents should be accepted, and the decision of the trial judge should be upheld for that reason."

Reached for comment on the Federal Court's ruling, a Sensis spokesman admitted that the company greeted the decision with much disappointment but he told the Sydney Morning herald that "we will now spend some time reviewing the judgment and considering our options."

Telstra is poised to absorb significant losses due to the court decision as the Sensis publications delivered some $2.3 billion in combined revenues for both the Yellow Pages and White Pages phone directories.