You can’t copyright it because in order to be copyrightable, a creation needs to have a minimum threshold of originality. Your made-up fact about grapes and olives doesn’t meet that test.
What if instead of 20 seconds, I took 2 hours in writing a chapter detailing the “history” of the cross breeding of ancient olives and grapes?
Here, this might help:
I don’t see the need for the shitty snark. I was just curious about the meaningful difference between a little bit of creative work and a larger amount of it.
I was trying to be helpful.
Moderator Note
If you were, that wasn’t the least bit helpful. It was also against GQ rules.
Chingon, I’m instructing you in the future to not to direct snark like this at other posters in this forum.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Like many things in the common law, we don’t have a clear bright line on what constitutes sufficient creative expression to be protectable by copyright, and what doesn’t. We do know that putting the names of telephone subscribers in alphabetical order—even fake ones that might have funny names—does not meet that threshold. Some lower courts have made rulings accepting the idea that putting symbols for things (towns, streets, whatever) in the same relative position on a map as in the real world does not meet that threshold. Artistically or poetically rearranging the state names on a US map probably would. Labeling the capital city of Ohio “Calumbis” probably doesn’t. Labeling the same city “Indigenouspeoplesville” is a closer case, as it shows evidence of originality.
In that case, your detailed chapter would clearly be a copyrightable text. But that does not mean the basic premise (the made-up factoid) is copyrightable. It’s like in literature, where a novel is subject to copyright but its basic premise isn’t.
Correct, copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed.
Facts, by themselves, cannot be copyrighted, but presentation of facts can. If I write a history book (even a fanciful one), and someone else writes another history book with the same events on the same dates as mine, I can’t say that they violated my copyright (well, I can say it, but the courts won’t agree with me). But if they copied a chapter from me, then they have violated my copyright.
And yes, there are gray areas. If we both show the same timeline, is that a creative enough presentation of the facts? What if the timeline includes whimsical events like “Last native North American pokemon go extinct”? What if it includes cartoon drawings in the margins illustrating the events?
Very interesting. I did read the Feist case last night and it repeatedly made the point about how some modicum of originality, and stressed that it was a small amount, was what was needed and that facts could not be copyrighted.
I was struck by the fact that although the Court mentioned the false names in the recitation of facts, it did not discuss them in its ultimate holding.
First, it discussed the “sweat of the brow” doctrine and repudiated it entirely. It basically said that the facts that John Smith lives at 123 Popular Street and his phone number is KL5-2840 are just that: facts. It didn’t matter if you busted your ass getting that fact, you can’t own that fact, everyone owns facts.
Second, the same analysis applies to getting everyone’s name, address, and phone number in the whole town, county, or state. All you are doing is aggregating facts no matter how hard you had to work.
In the Respondents’ last argument, it claimed that alphabetizing the names was an original creation. That’s where the meat of what (at least this part of it) we are talking about was discussed. The Court conceded that, yes, alphabetizing the names was in a sense a creative work, but it was so de minimis as to not be original. It noted that alphabetizing things was such a routine, clerical task that if anything could be called de minimis, it must include simply alphabetizing. Therefore, no original work, no copyright.
However, as the Court never mentioned the fake names again, it could be reasonably assumed that it considered those to be a de minimis original work as well, although it never said so much and it doesn’t harmonize with the rest of the opinion. It went on at length about how any amount of originality was enough. So if I made up a fake entry in the phone book to be Homer W. Howellsworth, 123 Snootery Lane, with a telephone number of 1-800-EAT-SHIT (not the words, the numbers) that seems to me at least to be a far less de minimis original work than simply alphabetizing.
But the Court didn’t address it, and I think that is a weakness of the opinion as it leaves the lower courts and the reader guessing about that particular facet of it. And to somewhat throw back to the OP, if I created a funny name as a copyright trap on my map, that would seem to be more than de minimis, not in the same way as simply alphabetizing.
I also get the point that an idea cannot be copyrighted. It would be silly if Back to the Future had to pay royalties to H.G. Wells’ descendants because the movie covered the general concept of time travel.
But I still looking at my “creativity,” my fictional contribution to the world that modern grapes have ancestry in olives, to be more than a de minimis creative work (although again, no Pulitzer Prizes there) not in the same vein as simply alphabetizing a list. And I think it more than a general idea; it’s pretty specific.
I’m not trying to argue as I really have no strong feelings either way, but it is an interesting concept.
In this regard, I’d like to point out that the originality required for a work to be eligible for copyright is not simply a function of how much work went into it. In the days before computers (when copyright law was already quite similar to what it is today), alphabetizing a large database manually would require a lot of human work, probably much more than writing a short text. Yet, the text would be copyrightable, the alphabetization wouldn’t. The key point about originality is not how many hours it took you to do the job; it’s whether there is a degree of creativity in it.
Right. I didn’t mean the amount of work, but the creativity and originality of a fake entry in a phone book. That is at least, IMHO, minimally creative whereas alphabetizing a list is not, even if alphabetizing is done manually and requires work.
That much is clear from the case, work is not important.