E-Business 101, Part 5: Intellectual Property - Copyrights
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Copyright law provides protection for original works of authorship, including literary works and audiovisual works. Computer software is classified as a literary work for purposes of U.S. copyright law. Copyright law prevents unauthorized direct copying or distribution. Unfortunately, copyright law protects only particular expression of an idea as opposed to the idea itself. A copyright in an original work of authorship is created automatically when the work is fixed in a tangible medium of expression.
There are many aspects of an E-business' Web site that might be protected by copyright. The Web site might include elements such as textual content, still images, photographs, animations, and sounds. An element included on a Web page might be protected individually by copyright if the element is sufficiently original and creative. For example, the Web site of the USA Today newspaper (www.usatoday.com) includes many separate and distinct articles, each of which may be protected by copyright. Similarly, legal articles on a law firm's Web Site, such as www.alderman.com may each be protected by copyright. The multi-colored top bar of the home page Web site of iWon, Inc., the sweepstakes based portal found at www.iwon.com, may be protected by copyright.
Even if some or all of the elements of a Web page are not protected by copyright individually, the selection, arrangement, layout of the elements on the Web page or the so-called "look and feel" of the Web page might be protected by copyright. For example, the selection and layout of buttons, icons, badges, banners, hyperlinks, text material may, in some cases, may be sufficiently original and creative to warrant copyright protection.
A Web page typically is programmed using a standard coding language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). When a user downloads the Web page, browser software operating on the user's computer interprets the HTML code to determine how to display the Web page on the user's computer. The HTML code underlying the Web page may be protected by copyright. For some Web sites, sophisticated software based on CGI or other programming techniques may be used to build all or part of a Web page dynamically when a user accesses the Web page or uses a feature of the Web site. In addition, such software may provide features and capabilities to the Web site, some of which may be transparent to a visitor to the Web site. For example, software might be used to prepare emails for distribution, target or select advertisements for display on a Web site, provide customer service or request information from a visitor to a Web site. While such "back end" software may not be part of the HTML programming for a Web page, the software may be protected by copyright separately from the copyright, if any, protecting the HTML coding of the Web site.
The ownership of a copyright should not be confused with ownership of a physical copy embodying the copyright. For example, a person may own a copy of a book without owning the copyrights to the story told in the book. Put another way, owning the book does not give the book owner permission to make copies of the book. The ownership rights to the tangible book may be sold and transferred independently of the intangible copyrights to the story. Thus, while a Web site may give limited permission to a visitor to download and use content displayed on the Web site, the Web site has not necessarily given permission for the visitor to make or distribute copies of the content.
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