Making Sense of the Copyrightability of Plots: A Case Study in the Ontology of Art

Abstract

ions where they are no longer protected, since otherwise the playwright could prevent the use of his ideas, to which, apart from their expression, his prop erty is never extended_Nobody has ever been able to fix that boundary, and nobody ever can.13 This has become known as the pattern test or abstraction test, and has been widely cited in subsequent copyright decisions.14 In essence, for Hand, there is a sliding scale: at one end are plots so impoverished in detail that they qualify only as ideas; at the other are plots detailed enough to qualify as expressions. The less developed a plot, the less likely that it may be protected by copy right because it will qualify only as an idea. Con versely, the more detailed it is, the more likely it will be found to be an original expression of the idea, and thus be protected by copyright.15 So, while an author might legitimately use the same idea as another author (say, the very simple plot of 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl'), he or she cannot copy the detailed way that the idea is expressed in the plot of, for example, Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989). As such, while both Say Anything and Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) will embody the same simple plot of 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl/ this plot is so simple only to qualify as an idea, and since each fills out the plot in different ways, the latter does not risk infringing the former. The is sue, Hand states, is that the point where the plot becomes detailed enough to qualify as an expres sion (and is therefore protected by copyright) may well be impossible to fix.