Blog Post Five

I have had the pleasure and honor of working with many creative and highly intelligent people.  It is not uncommon to receive a question along the lines of “I have an idea for a TV show or movie?  How can I copyright it?”

Unfortunately for the person posing the question above, ideas are not protectable by way of copyright.  More broadly, one can’t copyright ideas, concepts, systems, procedures, principles, methods or discoveries.  Remember, copyrights protect original works of authorship in a fixed medium.

If a person posing a question above wrote a screenplay, a script, acted out a scene and recorded it, any of those actions or fixed media could be subject to copyright protection.  But the idea itself would not.

There was a dispute several years ago between two yoga business involving copyrights.  The primary issue was whether the sequence of yoga poses was subject to copyright protection. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the sequences of poses was not subject to copyright protection.  However, if the instruction were recorded in writing or in a recorded video for consumers to purchase and watch, a copy of the written instructions or a copy of the video would constitute infringement. This is quite distinct from merely performing the sequence of yoga poses as originally articulated by the first person in time.