| > legal documents don't have copyright protection 1. That's an overstatement: For "original works of authorship," copyright happens automatically upon "fixation" in a "tangible medium of expression" (e.g., saving to a file, maybe even just typing). [0] And it doesn't take much "original ... authorship" to qualify for copyright protection. 2. Here's A hypothetical example: Alice drafts a contract from scratch as Version 1 and saves it to a file. It's copyrighted; on these facts, Alice owns the copyright. [0] Then Bob takes Alice's Version 1 and modifies it to create Version 1.1: Bob's "original" contributions to Version 1.1 are themselves protected by copyright, which Bob owns, bu with two caveats: (a) Bob has no claim to copyright in Alice's Version 1; and (b) Bob's own contributions to Version 1.1 won't be protected unless one or both of the following is true: (1) Bob had Alice's permission to base his "derivative work" on Alice's Version 1; [1] and/or (2) Bob's use of Version 1 qualified as "fair use" (a complicated question in itself). [2] NOTES: [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101; see also, e.g., https://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-contract-drafter-as-copyri... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/103 [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 |