Digital Commons Network^™

Rule-Based Expression In Copyright Law, Jeffrey Malkan

Jeffrey Malkan

Should copyright be extended to a work of authorship that consists of rules for producing another work of authorship, or, conversely, to a work that owes its genesis to the application of such rules? If ‘yes’ for either, are ‘A’ and ‘B’ two separate works, or two dimensions of the same work? In the leading case, Southco, Inc. v. Kanebridge Corp., the plaintiff claimed copyright protection for the individual serial numbers generated by a set of proprietary numbering rules; similar issues, however, are raised by any work whose claim to originality comes from how its literal elements are structured, such …