Abstract
Copyright law concerns itself with the protection of expressions of ideas. This includes literary
and artistic works, which refer to books, lectures, dramatic works, musical compositions,
drawings, photographic works, and illustrations, among other examples. Copyright law is not
concerned with protecting ideas themselves, but with protecting the manifestations of those ideas.
Copyright affords the author, or owner of the work, economic and moral rights. Economic rights
ensure that the author or owner has the ability to derive financial rewards from the work, while
moral rights offer the author or owner the ability to preserve and protect their connection to the
work.1 According to the Berne Convention2 (“the Convention”) for a work to subsist in copyright,
the work needs to be original and must be in a material form3
. The Convention, however, does not
define or outline the criteria for “originality”.
The Convention is an international copyright agreement first signed in 1886 in Switzerland. It
mandates equal treatment of copyrighted work by signatory countries (signatories) of the
Convention, known as the Berne Union. It requires signatory-member countries to recognise
copyrighted literary or artistic works as they recognise their national copyrights.
The signatories of the Convention have been consistent in applying the requirement that a work
must be in a material form for it to gain copyright protection. However, because of the lack of
guidance and predetermined criteria regarding what is deemed as original, there is no consistency
or uniformity in the approach used to determine what is original. The characteristic of originality
is a vital component for copyright to subsist in a work. In this dissertation, the researcher will
inquire into American (United States of America) and South African courts, and how they have
decided on matters dealing with originality. This dissertation will examine the standards that each...
LL.M. (Intellectual Property Law)