Copyright Basics

By Donald S. Passman

Excerpted from "All you need to know about the music business"
(without permission):

Definition of Copyright

The legal definition of a copyright is  "limited duration monopoly." Its purpose (as stated in the U.S. Constitution, no less) is to promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving creators exclusive rights to their works for a while. As you can imagine, if you created something and everybody immediately had the right to use it without paying you, not very many people would go to the trouble of creating anything (including you and me).

WhatŐs Copyrightable?

To be copyrightable, the work has to be original (not copied from something else) and of sufficient materiality to constitute a work. ThereŐs no specific test to cover this; itŐs decided on a case-by-case basis. For example, the five notes played by the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind are copyrightable because of their originality, even though theyŐre just five notes.