Examples of copyrightable works include novels, songs, sculptures, software codes, instruction manuals, paintings, and dramatic works. The owner of a copyright can exclude others from reproducing, adapting, publicly distributing, publicly displaying, or performing the copyrighted work. A copyright does not protect an idea itself, but rather the way that an author expresses the idea. For example, the idea for a story of a young woman who rebuilds her world after it is destroyed during a war and who loves a man she can never have while rejecting a man who loves her is not protectable by copyright. However, the novel Gone With the Wind , which is a particular expression of this idea, is copyrightable.
Copyrights protect only against copying.
They do not protect against someone else independently authoring the same or similar work. Therefore, it is not infringement of a copyright for an artist to create a painting which is identical to a copyrighted painting as long as the artist did not copy from the original painting. However, in many situations, such as with a complicated computer source code, the similarity of a competitor's work to a copyrighted work provides a very strong inference of copying which will tend to convince a court that the copyright has been infringed. Copyright protection lasts for a very long time. For works created after 1977, the copyright extends until 70 years after the death of the author.