0.3 The scope of copyright law  (Page 3/10)

The exclusion of ideas from copyright protection

As discussed in  Module 1 , copyright law does not protect ideas or facts. Instead, copyright law only protects the expression of those ideas or facts. The U.S. copyright statute is a typical example. It reads: 

“In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated or embodied in such work.” 

The same principle can be found in the major copyright treaties. The Berne Convention, for example, states that protection “shall not apply to news of the day or to miscellaneous facts having the character of mere items of press information.” Both the TRIPS Agreement and the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) state that, while expressions are copyrightable, “ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such” are not.

Excluding facts and ideas from protection helps to promote the public interest in freedom of speech. Extending copyright protection to ideas or facts would inhibit public debate by allowing copyright holders to control uses of the concepts or information contained in their works. Both political freedom and the progress of knowledge would suffer. In addition, excluding facts and the fundamental building blocks of information (such as the "news of the day") from protection ensures that the basic processes of cultural production are not impaired.

On occasion, an idea and its expression may become indistinguishable. If there is only one way of expressing a particular idea, the idea and the expression of that idea are said to  “ merge .”  The merger doctrine in copyright law was developed to deal with such cases, removing from the scope of copyright protection those expressions that constitute the only way of communicating an idea. What about situations in which an idea can only be expressed in a limited number of ways? The courts in some countries deal with such situations by granting limited or “thin” copyright protection to those expressions -- in other words, prohibiting only verbatim or virtually identical copying.

Owning a copy vs. owning a copyright

Ownership of a physical copy of a work is separate from copyright ownership in the work. Just because you own a copy of a book doesn’t mean you are free to copy it.

Ordinarily, when the creator of a work sells or transfers a copy of it to another person, she does not surrender her copyright unless she expressly agrees to do so. So, for example, the writer of a letter or an email message retains the copyright in the letter even after he has sent it to the recipient.

Even though the owner of a physical copy of a copyrighted work may not be entitled to copy it without permission, he or she is usually free to sell or rent it to other people. The rule that creates this privilege is known as the "first-sale" doctrine. As we will see, it is subject to certain exceptions involving commercial rental of some types of material.