Because procedures or methods of operation are not subject to copyright protection, something like a simple recipe cannot be copyrighted.[1] A Julia Child cookbook that includes recipes, descriptive text, and illustrations (and presumably many calories), however, is copyrightable. If you doubt whether a computer program is an unprotected method of operation or instead protected expression, remove the doubt: Computer programs may be protected by copyright.[2]
Copyright is available only for works “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.”[3] Fixation occurs when the embodiment of the work “is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration.”[4] Fixation is easily accomplished. The legislative history to the 1976 Act notes the breadth of Congress’s intent:
Under the bill it makes no difference what the form, manner, or medium of fixation may be—whether it is in words, numbers, notes, sounds, pictures, or any other graphic or symbolic indicia, whether embodied in a physical object in written, printed, photographic, sculptural, punched, magnetic, or any other stable form, and whether it is capable of perception directly or by means of any machine or device ‘now known or later developed.’[5]
In other words, text, images, and graphics—essentially anything we can see in print, on a television screen, on an iPad, or in some other medium—are sufficiently “fixed” to be copyrighted.
A helpful guide from the U.S. Copyright Office lists several categories of works generally not eligible for federal copyright protection for the reasons outlined above:
- Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents;
- Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration; and
