Opinion ID: 657247
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Public Domain

Text: 46 The two fundamental criteria of copyright protection [are] originality and fixation in tangible form.... H.R.Rep. No. 1476, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. 51 (1976), reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. 5659, 5664. 17 U.S.C. Sec. 102(a) establishes that copyright can only subsist in original works of authorship. (emphasis added). Originality in the field of copyright requires that the work be independently created by the author and that it possesses a minimal degree of creativity. Feist, 499 U.S. at 361, 111 S.Ct. at 1296. Accordingly, in determining copyright infringement, a court must filter out all unoriginal elements of a program, including those elements that are found in the public domain. See Comprehensive Technologies International, Inc. v. Software Artisans, Inc., 3 F.3d 730, 736 (4th Cir.1993); Altai, 982 F.2d at 710; Atari Games, 975 F.2d at 839; Brown Bag Software v. Symantec Corp., 960 F.2d 1465, 1474-75 (9th Cir.1992), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 113 S.Ct. 198, 121 L.Ed.2d 141 (1992); E.F. Johnson Co. v. Uniden Corp. of America, 623 F.Supp. 1485, 1499 (D.Minn.1985). Unoriginal elements of a program may be found at any level of abstraction. 47 Once a court has filtered out a program's ideas, processes, facts, and unoriginal elements, it has eliminated most of those elements that are unprotected based on the first principles of copyright law. However, in order to give effect to these principles, the courts have devised two additional filtration doctrines. These are the doctrines of merger and scenes a faire. 48