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The Story Of A Character: Establishing The Limits Of Independent Copyright Protection For Literary Characters, Samuel J. Coe
The Story Of A Character: Establishing The Limits Of Independent Copyright Protection For Literary Characters, Samuel J. Coe
Chicago-Kent Law Review
Copyright law provides writers with a way to protect their original works of authorship, but courts often disagree over the scope of this protection and how far it can be extended for the fictional characters appearing within literary works. Characters like Holden Caulfield and James Bond have become extremely valuable forms of intellectual property, but even for such iconic figures it can be difficult to separate the character from the story to determine where one work ends and the other begins. To address this issue, the Second Circuit follows the "distinctly delineated" test, which asks whether a character has been …