Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
Page Number: 16

12 

GOOGLE LLC v. ORACLE AMERICA, INC. 

Opinion of the Court 

exclusive rights it awards can sometimes stand in the way
of others exercising their own creative powers.  See gener-
ally Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U. S. 151, 
156 (1975); Mazer v. Stein, 347 U. S. 201, 219 (1954).

Macaulay  once  said  that  the  principle  of  copyright  is  a
“tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writ-
ers.”  T. Macaulay, Speeches on Copyright 25 (E. Miller ed. 
1913).  Congress, weighing advantages and disadvantages, 
will  determine  the  more  specific  nature  of  the  tax,  its 
boundaries and conditions, the existence of exceptions and 
exemptions, all by exercising its own constitutional power 
to write a copyright statute. 

Four provisions of the current Copyright Act are of par-
ticular relevance in this case.  First, a definitional provision 
sets forth three basic conditions for obtaining a copyright.
There must be a “wor[k] of authorship,” that work must be
“original,” and the work must be “fixed in any tangible me-
dium of expression.”  17 U. S. C. §102(a); see also Feist Pub-
lications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U. S. 340, 
345 (1991) (explaining that copyright requires some origi-
nal “creative spark” and therefore does not reach the facts 
that a particular expression describes). 

Second, the statute lists certain kinds of works that cop-
yright can protect.  They include “literary,” “musical,” “dra-
matic,”  “motion  pictur[e ],”  “architectural,”  and  certain 
other  works.  §102(a).    In  1980,  Congress  expanded  the
reach of the Copyright Act to include computer programs. 
And it defined “computer program” as “ ‘a set of statements 
or  instructions  to  be  used  directly  or  indirectly  in  a  com-
puter in order to bring about a certain result.’ ”  §10, 94 Stat.
3028 (codified at 17 U. S. C. §101).

Third, the statute sets forth limitations on the works that 
can  be  copyrighted,  including  works  that  the  definitional
provisions  might  otherwise  include.  It  says,  for  example,
that copyright protection cannot be extended to “any idea, 
procedure,  process,  system,  method  of  operation,  concept,