Archive for the ‘culture’ tag
Copyright, Remix Culture and a “Modicum of Creativity”
As an idle lawyer, I’ve got plenty of time to continue my study of the law. An area in which I have great interest is intellectual property law, especially copyrights and trademarks.
I recently read a Supreme Court dealing with the intersection of copyrights, facts and compilations of facts, Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). To answer the question, Justice O’Connor discusses the history of copyright and why facts are not copyrightable. In short, facts are not copyrightable because copyright protection, by constitutional mandate, requires originality.
Originality and novelty are not the same thing. As Justice O’Connor makes perfectly clear:
The sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author. Orignal, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. To be sure, the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice. (emphasis added; citations omitted).
For some reason, this paragraph makes me think about the “remix culture” and the debate over copyright that exists in today’s information society.
