674
Opinion of the Court
sage from which this statement is taken it is clear that the Court was saying just the opposite, namely, that equity will treat civil rights of a pecuniary nature as property rights even though they are properly not such:
"In order to sustain the jurisdiction of equity over the controversy, we need not affirm any general and absolute property in the news as such. The rule that a court of equity concerns itself only in the protection of property rights treats any civil right of a pecuniary nature as a property right . . . ; and the right to acquire property by honest labor or the conduct of a lawful business is as much entitled to protection as the right to guard property already acquired. . . . It is this right that furnishes the basis of the jurisdiction in the ordinary case of unfair competition." Id., at 236-237.
We may also note that the unfair competition at issue in International News Service amounted to nothing short of theft of proprietary information, something in which a power to "exclude others" could be said to exist. See id., at 233.
Petitioner argues that the common-law tort of unfair competition "by definition" protects property interests, Brief for Petitioner 15, and thus the TRCA "by definition" is designed to remedy and prevent deprivations of such interests in the false-advertising context. Even as a logical matter, that does not follow, since not everything which protects property interests is designed to remedy or prevent deprivations of those property interests. A municipal ordinance prohibiting billboards in residential areas protects the property interests of homeowners, although erecting billboards would ordinarily not deprive them of property. To sweep within the Fourteenth Amendment the elusive property interests that are "by definition" protected by unfair-competition law would violate our frequent admonition that the Due Process Clause is not merely a "font of tort law." Paul v. Davis, 424 U. S. 693, 701 (1976).
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