Copyright is everywhere in business—your logo, website content, software, and marketing materials all carry legal protection. But the key principle is that copyright protects creative works, not functional ones. A notepad with simple ruled lines has a purely practical purpose and likely isn’t protectable. Add a distinctive artistic design to that notepad, and the analysis changes. Courts draw the line at whether something contains an element of creativity beyond mere function.

What Counts as a Creative Work

Movies, songs, book text, cover art, software code, video games, logos—all protectable. Even interpretations and translations of older works receive their own copyright protection. A single product can contain multiple copyrights: the game’s software code, its cover art, and each logo on the packaging may all be owned by different parties. Every image on your website potentially involves someone else’s intellectual property.

Purely functional designs—standard line spacing on a notepad, basic geometric shapes, common layouts—generally lack the creativity threshold courts require. Ideas, facts, and concepts cannot be copyrighted; only the specific creative expression of those ideas qualifies. There has to be some artistic aspect—it’s not enough for a work to serve only a practical purpose.

Why This Matters for Your Business

Business owners routinely create copyrightable content without realizing it—and routinely use others’ copyrighted material without permission. Audit your marketing materials, website images, and content to ensure you either own the rights or have proper licenses. On the flip side, register copyrights for your most valuable creative assets so you have full legal remedies if someone copies them.

Video Transcript

Aaron Hall: As a business owner, you might think of copyright as something for artists, musicians, or filmmakers, but the truth is copyright is everywhere from the logo on your website to the software you use to the content your team creates in this video. We are breaking down real world examples of copyright in action and showing you how even small design choices can carry big legal protections.

You’ll learn what counts as a creative work, what doesn’t, and how to protect the content your business depends on.

Movies and Their Elements

Let’s take a look at some other examples here. You have a movie, the Movie of Annie. The movie itself is protected by copyright. Each song on there is protected by copyright. There might even be other aspects of the movie that are protected by copyright.

The cover art is protected by a copyright. The cover of the album, or at least the logo here, is protected by copyright.

Video Games and Software

What about a game? A video game, certainly software code is protected by copyright. Why? Because there’s artistic elements to that, how that software code is put together. Likewise, the cover here is protected by copyright and there might be different copyrights.

For example, the company that put together this logo. That company might be different from the company that put together this logo. So you might have a copyright in this logo. Copyright in this logo, and maybe all sorts of different images here might have separate copyrights.

Books and Written Works

What about books? Yes, I. The text within this book is protected by copyright. Any images in the book is protected by copyright. The cover art is protected by copyright.

Interpretations and Translations

What about interpretations? This is one of my favorite versions of the Bible. The message. It’s a different interpretation of another work. The original work may have been thousands of years old. But you have a more recent interpretation.

Is this protectable by copyright? It certainly is. Interpretations or translations are protected by copyright as well.

Everyday Objects and Design Choices

What about this notepad? Well, on one hand you have a little logo up there, so that’s protected by copyright, but what about the lines, the placement of the lines here? Somebody, some graphic artist had to put that together.

So is it protected by copyright? Well. Courts have struggled with this and ultimately said, look, there has to be some element of art to it. It’s not enough to just have a functional purpose. There needs to be some artistic aspect.

Now, if you look closely, there are two lines going down the side here. Perhaps there’s a little bit of. Artistic creativity in having two lines instead of just one, whether it be a bold or thin line, but frankly, that’s gonna be pretty hard to argue in favor of copyright because there just isn’t much more than a practical aspect to this.

So keep in mind the idea of copyright is to protect creative works. But not all works. There has to be an element of creativity to it.

Functional Products With Artistic Features

What about this keyboard, this typewriter? Is there any copyright associated with this? Well, if you look at it, this is definitely more than just functional. There’s some colors and there’s some design elements on it. There’s at least some element of copyright here.

What does that mean? It means nobody could exactly replicate this without violating copyright. Now, could somebody use similar colors and still make a typewriter like this? I. Sure. It’d have to look different though. It can’t be copied from this.

Free Resources for Business Owners

If you’d like to know more about how to avoid trouble like this, I have a free resource at AaronHall.com/free.

I provide information for business owners of small to midsize companies on how to avoid common legal problems. That includes. A PDF. It includes videos talking about important issues. I’m Aaron Hall. I’m an attorney for business owners and entrepreneurial companies. If you’d like, subscribe to this channel so you can get more educational content like this.