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Creativity And Copyright, Dennis S. Karjala

Dennis S Karjala

Nearly everyone, from layperson to professional, thinks of copyright as the primary mode of legal protection for the intellectual fruits of creative artists and authors. While necessarily conceding that copyright has been extended in recent decades to cover a large number of highly mundane works, most scholars still see authorial “creativity” as the one element common to the vast array of works that now fall under the copyright umbrella. In the United States, this view has purportedly been elevated to constitutional status with the Supreme Court’s 1991 decision in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service, which stated in dictum that creativity …