Definition
"Erty right in" does not appear to be a complete or independent legal term. The source material supplied is a partial entry — almost certainly a fragment of a longer Bouvier's entry beginning with "prop-" on the preceding page, the full heading being PROPERTY RIGHT IN. The surviving text addresses a specific application: that a board of trade holds a property right in the market quotations generated by transactions on its exchange, at least until those quotations are published. The furnishing of such quotations to customers — whether by ticker or blackboard — was the subject of early-twentieth-century litigation over whether commercial data compiled and distributed by a private exchange could be protected as proprietary.
The fragment references a federal case (103 Fed. 902) and describes the factual context: a board of trade preparing quotations through its officers and agents, then transmitting them exclusively to paying customers. The underlying legal proposition is that the labor and organization required to produce and distribute such data gives the originating body a cognizable property interest, sufficient to support an action against unauthorized use or interception.
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Common Confusion
Researchers should not treat "erty right in" as a recognized legal term of art. It is an indexing artifact. Any search, citation, or cross-reference built on this form will miss the substantive entry. The correct search term is PROPERTY RIGHT IN, or more broadly, PROPERTY (subtopic: rights in commercial data or market quotations).
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Why It Matters in Research
This entry is primarily useful as a navigational flag. Researchers encountering the phrase "erty right in" in a digitized or microfilmed version of Bouvier's are looking at a page-break artifact — the word "property" has been split across pages, with "prop-" lost. Optical character recognition (OCR) errors of exactly this kind are common in large-scale digitization projects and can cause full entries to be indexed under truncated or meaningless headings.
The substantive content, once reconstructed as PROPERTY RIGHT IN [market quotations], connects to a significant body of early commercial law. The question of whether exchange-generated price data constitutes private property was contested through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, implicating unfair competition doctrine, misappropriation, and the limits of intellectual property. The fragment's citation to 103 Fed. 902 points to the federal reporter series from that era and would repay verification against the full case.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus on topics such as trade secret law, misappropriation doctrine, the "hot news" doctrine, or the legal status of financial data should treat this entry as a pointer to the broader Bouvier's discussion of property rights in commercial information — not as a self-contained definition.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole source for this fragment. The entry, as recoverable, reflects late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American doctrine on the proprietary nature of exchange data — a question that courts of that period resolved by analogy to common law property concepts rather than through any statutory framework. The invocation of a federal circuit decision (103 Fed. 902) as authority is characteristic of Bouvier's method: grounding definitions in judicial application rather than abstract formulation.
No other historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to have supplied parallel material for this fragment. The incompleteness of the entry means that any synthesis across shelf sources must rely on reconstruction of the parent entry PROPERTY RIGHT IN rather than the truncated form as indexed.
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