Opinion ID: 659340
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Protectable and Unprotectable Elements of K-T's

Text: Copyrighted Materials 19 LSI argues nonetheless that the portions of K-T's licensed materials that it allegedly copied are but unprotectable ideas or facts, and that the district court therefore erred in holding that LSI infringed K-T's copyright. LSI is correct that the mere fact that K-T's Licensed Materials are copyrighted does not mean that all aspects of those materials are automatically protected. 7 Specifically, LSI rightly observes that copyright law protects tangible, original expressions of ideas, not ideas themselves. 8 [N]o author may copyright facts or ideas. The copyright is limited to those aspects of the work--termed 'expression'--that display the stamp of the author's originality. 9 Thus, if we conclude that LSI only copied unprotectable elements of K-T's materials, we must reverse the district court's judgment. 20 Unfortunately, the line between idea and expression is hard to draw. Additionally, when an idea can be expressed in very few ways, copyright law does not protect that expression, because doing so would confer a de facto monopoly over the idea. In such cases idea and expression are said to be merged. 10 To determine the scope of copyright protection in a close case, a court may have to filter out ideas, processes, facts, idea/expression mergers, and other unprotectable elements of plaintiff's copyrighted materials to ascertain whether the defendant infringed protectable elements of those materials. In this case, however, we disagree with LSI's contention that such a filtration process leads to the conclusion that the district court erred in finding that LSI's MPO program infringed K-T's Licensed Materials. 21 Although there is no evidence that the district court undertook a rigorous abstraction-filtration-comparison analysis of the sort approved by courts for sophisticated treatment of copyright cases, 11 such an analysis was not absolutely necessary here. The district court carefully juxtaposed selections from K-T's Licensed Materials with selections from the MPO program, thereby demonstrating a damning similarity--nay identity--of organization and language. This comparison of literal language or expression provided strong evidence for the court's finding that the MPO program infringed K-T's Licensed Materials. 22 Seizing upon the court's statement that the questions and processes of the Vroom-Yetton model are its heart and soul, LSI argues that these elements are inherent in the leadership management theory ... of the Vroom models, implying that questions and processes that comprise the V-Y Model are unprotectable ideas. LSI contends that there is no protectable expression remaining in K-T's licensed materials, once all unprotectable elements are filtered out. But this is absurd. 23 Each question and process in the V-Y Model is presented in a paragraph of text. There are countless ways of expressing the content of each paragraph, 12 so there was no need for the MPO screen text to copy exactly the language of K-T's materials. Even if each of the eight questions and five processes conveys unprotectable ideas, the specific words, phrases, and sentences selected to convey those ideas are protectable expression under any reasonable abstraction analysis. As LSI's MPO program copied those words, phrases, and sentences verbatim, we conclude that--far from being clearly erroneous--the district court's finding that the MPO program infringed K-T's Licensed Materials was correct and must be affirmed. 13