Page:The librarian's copyright companion, by James S. Heller, Paul Hellyer, Benjamin J. Keele, 2012.djvu/21

Chapter One. General Principles

Copyright protection is very broad. The Copyright Act provides that a wide array of works may be copyrighted, as long as they are “original” and “fixed in any tangible medium of expression.” “Original” means that the work was independently created by the author (not copied from another source) and has at least a minimal level of creativity. Only the parts of a work that are original are subject to copyright protection.

There must also be an expression for copyright to attach. This is often called the idea/expression dichotomy: Only the expression of an idea is protected by copyright, not the idea by itself. For example, you cannot copyright the idea of a romance between a northern gunrunner and a southern belle in the post-Civil War South, but Margaret Mitchell could copyright the expression of that idea in her novel Gone With The Wind.