Speaker 1: Max Levine here again from the law offices of Max Levine and I'm super stoked because today we are making our second video in a series of 5 to 10 minute videos about copyright law. As always, these videos are not legal advice. If you have a particular issue, come talk to a qualified attorney. So today we're talking about what kinds of things, what kinds of work does copyright law apply to. And today's video is about as legally technical as we're going to get in this series of videos. For a lot of you, the fact that your final work product is protected by copyright law is pretty straightforward. So I can save you a little bit of time. If you're a photographer, videographer, graphic designer, if you write pretty much anything, if you write or record podcasts, if you're a musician who writes or records your work, if you're an architect, boom, copyright law applies to your final work product. You can either skip this video or, you know, leave it on in the background and kind of pay attention to it. But it's probably worth watching the next video in this series, which is about what copyright law does not apply to. So you do want to understand where in your work process and in your business copyright law doesn't protect you and therefore where you might want to take other kinds of precautions to protect your work and your business. Okay, so let's get into it. The big daddy of copyright law is the following somewhat arcane phrase, and it's from Title 17 of the United States Statutes, Section 102A, and it says that copyright law subsists and copyright protection subsists or exists in, here's the phrase, original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression. Okay, so original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression. We break that down basically into three requirements, okay? Is it a work of authorship? Is it original? And is it fixed in a tangible medium of expression? We call that the fixation requirement. Okay, is it a work of authorship? So I know the phrase kind of makes it sound like you need to have written a Shakespearean sonnet in order to qualify for copyright protection. That's not at all the case. These requirements, all of them actually, are very broadly construed, okay? So if it's a work of authorship, we're not asking whether it has artistic merit or social value. There is no snobby high court of artsiness in the United States, okay? are not there to decide whether your stuff is creative or artistic or socially valuable. Even though the statute specifically mentions eight kinds of works that are protected by copyright law, and we're going to discuss those obviously, your work doesn't even have to fit into those existing categories of creative works to be protected by copyright law. The whole purpose of copyright law is to protect creativity, and therefore new kinds of works can also be protected by copyright law. Here are the eight categories, and they overlap a little bit, that are certainly protected by copyright law. Okay, so literary works, and again, this doesn't mean a sonnet, right? It means pretty much anything written in words or numbers or symbols, including code. Computer code, when it's protected by copyright law, is a very complicated area. We are not getting into that today. The second category, the first is literary. Second category is musical works and their words, right, lyrics. Third category, dramatic works and their music, so your plays, your musical, all that stuff. Fourth category, choreography and pantomime. Fifth category, pictorial, graphic, and sculptural work. So here's how broad that is, right? So that includes 2D and 3D work, that's fixed, that's not moving. So graphic design, photos, globes, charts, diagrams, technical drawings, and also belt buckles, vodka bottles, lamps, mannequins, treehouse designs, finger paintings, and scarecrows. Those all fit into pictorial, graphic, and sculptural work. Motion pictures and other audiovisual works, okay? Sound recordings, and I mean any sound recording, okay? You take your sound recorder, you put it next to a babbling brook, you press record, you press stop three seconds later. That recording, protected by copyright law. Finally, eighth category is architectural works, okay? And that can be in an architectural drawing, it can actually be embodied in a building. Other stuff besides those eight categories that are protected by copyright law, these are important. So compilations. So if you make a compilation of other people's copyrighted work with their permission, or of your own copyrighted work, or of works that aren't subject to copyright, maybe they've exceeded the time limit imposed on copyright protection, a collection and assembly of preexisting material that becomes its own original work of authorship can itself be protected by copyright law. Now, you won't have a copyright in the original works, you'll have a copyright in the compilation. The other thing that's very important to know about is something called derivative work, okay? So that's a new work based on one or more preexisting works. So think a translation, a sequel, a reproduction in a new medium, or maybe in a new era, or a terrible remastering of an existing video game. All of those are derivative works, and as long as they are made legally with the original material, they themselves can be protected by copyright. Okay, so that's the work of authorship requirement. Then we go to the originality requirement. And again, this is very, very broadly construed. We're not asking, is what you did an embodiment of an amazing, valuable idea? No. The originality requirement basically requires two things. Okay, one, did you create the work independently? Okay, so that means someone else didn't create it. It also means that it's something that you create. Okay, so it's not a fact. It's not a scientific discovery. It's a creation, okay? And finally, does it possess some minimal level of creativity? And here's how minimal that level has to be. The key phrase is it's not so mechanical or routine as to require no creativity whatsoever. So as long as it doesn't require no creativity whatsoever, and as long as you made it, right, it's not a fact or something that somebody else made, it satisfies the originality requirement. There are some interesting questions at the very margins. So for instance, the copyright office says that, hey, if you make a compilation with three or fewer works, that's not creative enough to qualify as a compilation that's protected by copyright law. But again, that's how low the bar is, right? It's very hard to fail the originality requirement. Fixed in a tangible medium of expression, that's our third major requirement to be protected by copyright law. We call this fixation. So again, very minimal. Any tangible medium of expression counts, okay? Even if it can only be read by a machine. So computer code, if it's a digital image, a recording digital, that's fine. That is fixed in a tangible medium of expression. It must be fixed, but this does not mean engraved in stone tablets, okay? Any period of more than transitory duration, okay, so that means digital, again, suffices. And in fact, the U.S. Copyright Office seems to take the position that even temporary computer memory is fixed enough to satisfy this requirement, okay? So those are the basic requirements of copyright law as to what is protected by copyright. Most of the time, the answer is fairly straightforward with the work that you'll be doing, but for those of you doing very avant-garde stuff, it's important to know what is actually protected by copyright. Again, Max Levine from the Law Offices of Max Levine, and thank you for watching.