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Copyright Law Essay

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Overview‐Policies
 Copyright protection provides the owner of an original work of authorship the right to prevent others from using the work without the owner’s permission.
 Copyright law protects against the copying of an “expression of an idea” but does not protect the idea itself.
 this protection is limited compared to patent law because copyright law allows for independent creation of a copyrighted work as a defense to copyright infringement.
 The theory is that 2 people can create exact or similar works without copying one another; therefore, each has copyright protection in their respective work.
 The policy is similar to patents. We want to encourage creativity, but also provide the public with the freest possible access to …show more content…

copyright law applied to works created today. [Our focus.]
 Earlier created works are governed by either the “Copyright Act of 1976, originally enacted” or the “Copyright Act of 1909

Subject Matter of Copyrights
 Copyright Act provides a long list of works that may be copyrighted, but the list is not exclusive.
 the law is left fluid, allowing courts to extend copyright protection to new forms and ways of expressing ideas, as they may be developed in the future.  Today, the Copyright Act provides that Copyright protection extends to “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.”

The 2 key requirements are:
 1) Original‐ meaning that the author created the work and did not copy it from someone else.
 there must be some level of creativity involved
 in the Feist case, the court held that arranging the listings of a telephone book alphabetically was not creative enough
 names, addresses and phone numbers are public facts or data and are not original and therefore not copyrightable;  but the arrangement and selection of facts or data may be copyrightable if done in an original way;
 alphabetizing is simply not original.

2) Fixation‐ in order to receive copyright

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