What is a copyright?

Probably the best known of intellectual property categories, copyright
automatically applies to all types of original expression, including art, sculpture,
literature, music, songs, choreography, crafts, poetry, flow charts, software,
photography, movies, CD-ROMs, video games, videos, websites, and graphic
designs. The automatic protection can be enhanced by registering the work with
the U.S. Copyright Office for a nominal fee.

Copyright lasts for many years. Most often it lasts for the life of the work’s
creator (its author) plus 70 years. In cases where the creator is a business, the
copyright lasts between 95 and 120 years. Although copyright protection is longlived,
it only applies to the literal expression, not to the ideas and concepts underlying
that expression.

Most nations of the world offer copyright protection to works by U.S. citizens
and nationals, and the U.S. offers its copyright protection to the citizens and
nationals of these same nations.

A copyright gives the owner of a creative work the right to keep others from using
the work without the owner’s permission. The key to understanding copyright law
is to understand the difference between an idea and the expression of the idea.
Copyright applies only to a particular expression, not to the ideas or facts underlying
the expression. For instance, copyright may protect a particular song, novel,
or computer game about a romance in space, but it cannot protect the underlying
idea of having a love affair among the stars.

More specifically, a creative work (often referred to as a “work of authorship”)
must meet all of these three criteria to be protected by copyright:
• It must be original. In other words, the author must have created rather
than copied it.
• It must be fixed in a tangible (concrete) medium of expression. For
example, it might be expressed on paper, audio or video tape, computer
disk, clay, or canvas.
• It must have at least some creativity—that is, it must be produced by an
exercise of human intellect. There is no hard and fast rule as to how much
creativity is enough. To give an example, it must go beyond the creativity
found in the telephone white pages, which involve a nondiscretionary
alphabetic listing of telephone numbers rather than a creative selection of
listings.