How to copyright a work under the US Copyright Act?
By admin in Copyrights and Patents on November 11th, 2009
Laws regarding copyrights are covered under the Copyright Act of 1976, under the federal statute. It covers “original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression.” (US Copyright Act). It prevents and prohibits original works from being copied. But the protection is restricted to the written or “fixed” works and not to the ideas behind them. Earlier, works needed to be registered to be protected under this Act, but now that has been done away with.
Criteria to obtain a copyright as stated under the US Copyright Act have been outlined below.
Originality Requirement
The work under consideration must be original, but the extent of originality required is very small. The work should not be a mechanical reproduction of an earlier copyrighted work but, at the same time, cannot be a single word or phrase. Also, if it is a compilation, it should have some amount of originality in the arrangement of works (this point has been detailed later).
Works of Authorship
The “works of authorship” categories state the different kinds of works that are covered under the Act. They have beeen deliberately kept ambiguous and general so as to cover newer inventions and technologies as and when they come up, thus doing away with the need to modify the Act time and again.
- Literary works;
- Musical works, including any accompanying words;
- Dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
- Pantomimes and choreographic works;
- Pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;
- Motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
- Sound recordings; and
- Architectural works.
Although the list seems restricted, it covers a wide range of works due to its ambiguity.
Fixation
This section refers to the tangibility of works covered under the Act. Any work, to be covered under this Act, has to be a concrete piece of work that’s written on paper, cassettes, CDs, etc. I deas are not covered unless the are reproduced in a tangible medium.
Automatic Creation
After amendments to the Act in 1978, the need for registration of a work to be protected under the Copyright Act has been done away with. A work is protected as soon as it is “fixed” and meets the above 3 criteria. This is applicable to works after 1st January, 1978. Works that were unprotected until then remain so.
Compilation Copyrights
This is a special category of works that can be copyrighted. Compilations are defined as “collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” (US Copyright Act). A good eample of this would be a compilation of the most popular poems of the 17th Century. Such work would be covered under the Act as the works themselves would have no copyrights or their protection might be expired, and there would be some amount of creativity involved in selecting, sorting and ordering the works.
A compilation of facts put together would also be protected under the Act as this would involve some work and originality.