Threshold of originality
[4] In the United Kingdom the topic came up in 2000, during the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed, when a security guard at a property owned by Dodi's father, Mohamed Al Fayed, took still-frame photographs from security video – which showed the couple in the driveway just before their deaths – and sold them to a newspaper.
Ultimately, that case concluded that copying and selling the photographs did not lead to a defence of fair dealing, nor did it serve the public interest.
[10] Russian copyright law specifically exempts purely informational reports on events and facts from protection, and security camera footage is not considered a work of authorship.
Slater argued that he had copyright interest in the photo because he had "engineered" the shot, and that "it was artistry and idea to leave them to play with the camera and it was all in my eyesight.
[18] Despite consisting only of two fields and a circle at the centre, the Federal Court of Australia had upheld copyright claims over the Australian Aboriginal flag by its designer, Harold Thomas.
Chief Justice McLachlin stated that the "exercise of skill and judgment" was necessary in order for an expression to attract copyright protection.
[30][31] In June 2016, a state court ruled in a complaint against the Wikimedia Foundation by the Reiss Engelhorn Museum that digital reproductions of public domain works are subject to a new copyright.
[32] A controversial decision on 16 July 2013 rendered "backseat conversations"—such as those between Willem Endstra and police—not sufficiently creative for copyright protection.
[37] Citing American and Canadian case law, the Court established that judgements or court orders by published by judicial authorities were considered to be in the public domain per Section 52(1)(q) of the Copyright Act, and that a work would meet the originality standard as long as there is labour or effort involved, but not only labour.
Tokyo High Court ruled that although the shape is stylised, the text is in a normal arrangement and keeps its function of being read as a sequence of letters.
[40] Copyright law of Switzerland defines works as being "creations of the mind, literary or artistic, that have an individual character.
[42] By contrast, in the 2004 case Blau Guggenheim v. British Broadcasting Corporation, the Court found that a photo, shot by a reporter to document Christoph Meili with the files he had taken from his employer, lacked individual character.
The court opinion stated that copyright protection could only be granted to "works of authorship" that possess "at least some minimal degree of creativity".
For example, the expression of some obvious methods of compilation and computation, such as the Yellow Pages or blank forms, cannot receive a copyright (demonstrated in Morrissey v. Procter & Gamble), but sufficiently original elements within the work itself can still be eligible for protection.
[49] The requirement of originality was also invoked in the 1999 United States District Court case Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.
In the case, Bridgeman Art Library questioned the Corel Corporation's rights to redistribute their high quality reproductions of old paintings that had already fallen into the public domain due to age, claiming that it infringed on their copyrights.
[51] In May 2016, Judge Percy Anderson ruled that remastered versions of musical recordings are eligible to receive a new copyright if they contain "multiple kinds of creative authorship, such as adjustments of equalization, sound editing and channel assignment", that are perceptible from the original work.
The label on Skyy's vodka bottle consists only of text and does not include any pictorial illustrations.In works produced in a mechanical medium, "there is broad scope for copyright .
'"[55] With respect to United States law, Stephen M. McJohn writes: The limitation of copyright to "works of authorship" also implies an author.
[2]Difficulties arise when attempting to determine the boundary line between mechanical or random processes and instances in which the slight intervention of a human agent results in the production of a copyrightable work.
The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment posited that the question is open as to whether computers are unlike other tools of creation in that they are possible of being co-creators.
The 1900 UK case Walter v. Lane ruled that the copyright of an account of a speech transcribed by a reporter belonged to the newspaper he worked for because of the effort it took to reproduce his spoken words.
[59] Courts in the United States rejected this notion in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service (1991) and Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. (1999).
[60] A similar precedent was set in Canada by cases such as Tele-Direct (Publications) Inc. v. American Business Information Inc. (1997), where the court concluded that compilations of data must embody originality and creativity in order to be copyrighted.
