Anandashankar Mazumdar, Library of Congress; Historic Court Cases That Helped Shape Scope of Copyright Protections
"As the Copyright Office celebrates its 150th birthday, we can look back more than 240 years through the history of copyright protections in the United States to see how the law has changed in response to changing technologies and economics.
The authors of the U.S. Constitution believed that copyright was important enough to explicitly grant the federal government the power to grant authors the exclusive right to their writings.
When the first U.S. Congress convened in 1789, it put enactment of the country’s first Copyright Act on its agenda. The Copyright Act of 1790 extended copyright protections to “maps, charts, and books.” But copyright protection in 2020 covers many more types of creative expression.
The federal courts have been crucial in looking at creative media and setting the boundaries of what is protected and what isn’t. This is a look back at some of the most important court rulings on what is and isn’t protectable throughout the years under U.S. copyright law.
These cases reflect some of the landmarks for American courts for defining the scope of copyright protection: (1) Is a system of accounting and its ledgers protected? (2) Is a photograph protected when the law doesn’t explicitly mention photographs? (3) Is an advertisement protected? And (4) Is a creative work incorporated into a useful article protected?"
