How to Invent and Protect Your Invention: A Guide to Patents for Scientists and Engineers

4.3 COPYRIGHTS

Copyright promotes creativity by giving authors, artists, composers, computer programmers, and other creators special rights to exclude others from selling and using their work. Copyright protects original and expressive creative works that fall into seven major categories:

• Literary works, including computer programs
• Pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works
• Architectural works
• Musical compositions
• Sound recordings
• Dramatic, pantomime, and choreographic works
• Motion pictures and other visual works

Copyright law protects expression, not ideas, meaning that it only protects creative output that is fixed in a tangible medium, such as text, pictures, or a musical score. It does not protect intangible things such as ideas, concepts, or methods of doing things. Thus, a copyright could be filed to protect Leonard Bernstein's original music for West Side Story or to protect Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, Arthur Laurents's script, or Jerome Robbins's choreography. A copyright could not be filed to protect the general plot of a young couple torn apart by two warring gangs, regardless of whether Shakespeare came up with the idea first. As copyright law applies to software, this means that a copyright owner can prevent others from using the written language of the code, but cannot prevent others from writing a program that performs the same function. As previously noted, some software programs are patentable and a very broadly written patent could prevent others from writing a ...