Re: copyright notice on contract

This response is only with respect to U.S. law.

When I practiced I saw many, many contracts with copyright notices -- store-bought form leases, form contracts from various organizations (construction and software industries mostly), not to mention wills and trust forms.

I did not see them on custom contracts being negotiated.

I don't think the copyright of a contract protects much because most of the important stuff are actually ideas and there are relatively limited numbers of ways expressing the ideas in legally precise language, trivial sentence structure differences aside.

Has anyone looked into this? I can't believe that a court would protect partiular contract clauses from being copied by another attorney or client and I can't believe that the SSO would be protectible or the selection of what to include.

An alternative view would be to consider every use except reproduction for commercial resale as form or sample contracts would be fair use. But that seems a bit of a stretch, really, and not worth the bother.

Finally, most contract terms would be in the public domain since most contracts were not copyrighted and most contract terms have been around since long before the registration requirements disappeared.

I haven't looked, but I wonder if insurance companies are claiming copyright in their "plain language" contracts and if so whether they are giving notice of the fact on the contracts.

--
Steven D. Jamar
Professor of Law
Director LRW Program (http://law.howard.edu/lrw/)
Howard University School of Law
2900 Van Ness Street NW
Washington, DC  20008

vox:  202-806-8017   fax:  202-806-8428
email:  sjamar[_at_]law.howard.edu

Those who fear men like laws.

Marquis de Vauvenargues, French moralist, in "Reflexions" 1746