The purpose of this article is to study the essential features of the civil law regime of objects of copyright and related rights, which makes it possible to specify the conditions (criteria) for the protection of the results of intellectual activity at different time periods of historical development and within different legal systems. Moreover, the use of standards for the protection of objects will be analyzed not only in continental copyright and related rights systems, but also in common law countries, where a work is treated not as an idea, but as a thing (commodity) localized in space.