Copyrightable Works
Copyrightable Works
- Literary works
- Musical works
- Dramatic works
- Pantomimes and choreographic works
- Pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works
- Motion pictures and other audiovisual works
- Sound recordings
- Architectural works
If the work is original, and fixed in any tangible medium of expression
But not ideas, procedures, processes, systems, concepts …Copyright protection is very broad. The Copyright Act provides that a wide array of works may be copyrighted, as long as they are “original” and “fixed in any tangible medium of expression.”[1] “Original” means that the work was independently created by the author (not copied from another source) and has at least a minimal level of creativity.[2] Only the parts of a work that are original are subject to copyright protection.[3]
There must also be an expression for copyright to attach. This is often called the idea/expression dichotomy: Only the expression of an idea is protected by copyright, not the idea by itself.[4] For example, you cannot copyright the idea of a romance between a northern gunrunner and a southern belle in the post-Civil War South, but Margaret Mitchell could copyright the expression of that idea in her novel Gone With The Wind.
- ↑ 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (2006).
- ↑ Feist Publ’ns v. Rural Tel. Serv., 499 U.S. 340, 345 (1991) (“The requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice.”).
- ↑ Id. at 348.
- ↑ 17 U.S.C. § 102(b) (2006); SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F.3d 1257, 1263–64 (11th Cir. 2001); Ho v. Taflove, 648 F.3d 489, 497–98 (7th Cir. 2011).
