From the course: Understanding Intellectual Property

What is copyright law?

From the course: Understanding Intellectual Property

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What is copyright law?

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- What is copyright law? The first question most people ask me about copyright law is simply what is it? They often think that they can use copyright law to protect their idea. So they say, "I have a great idea, but how can I copyright that?" But you can't actually use copyright law to protect ideas. Copyright law protects the expression, not the idea. You can only protect the idea once it has been put into a tangible thing, a medium of expression. A typical example of what you can copyright is a book. If you've written a book, you can copyright the book. You can't copyright the idea of the book. A copyright covers things that have been created, so there are two essential requirements for copyright, an original work of authorship and it needs to be fixed in a tangible form. You need to have done something that becomes expressed such that you can provide the copyright office with an example of it. The thing about copyright law is that it doesn't protect the idea embedded in your expression. The protection is only going to be applicable to the expression and not the idea behind it. Imagine a story about a loner who travels to a distant land, becomes friendly with the indigenous people and then eventually becomes one of them, and then ends up becoming adverse to the people that he once was with. This is a story that we've probably seen a few times. It sounds a bit like "Avatar". It sounds a bit like the "Last Samurai", "Dances with Wolves", the "Emerald Forest", and "The Mission". There are a number of movies that wrap around that theme. The idea that I just explained isn't protectable, but the particular story that packages around it, that expression that will be protectable, and you can protect that under copyright law. Additionally, if something that could be copyrighted is primarily functional, then copyright law won't protect it. There was a famous case with a bike rack. You may have seen these that are squiggly bike racks. The creator alleged that it was artwork. It was a three-dimensional sculptural work. It was art. And therefore, the artist in the beginning thought, "Well, I should be able to protect this." But the courts found that this was actually too utilitarian. It was used to park bikes and to lock bikes up, and therefore the primary function was utilitarian and it couldn't be protected as a work of art. We call this utilitarian function. If something has utility, then copyright protection is going to be either diminished or have no protection whatsoever. That applies to physical things like bike racks that look like sculptures, but also elements of software that have utility, including aspects of user interfaces. Data is not protectable. Databases as a whole can be protected as a collection. So if someone steals an entire database, you might be able to sue them for infringing the entire database. But the data in it isn't protectable because the data is not an original work of authorship. It's simply a bunch of data. For example, the information in a list in an online database or a directory of addresses. But the assembly of those into a database together, it can be protectable as an original work of authorship because someone has selected and arranged the data in a particular way.

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