Copyright
A federal grant of exclusive rights in original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Protection arises automatically upon fixation; registration is generally a prerequisite to suing for infringement of a U.S. work. The rights arise under federal law, though licenses are often governed by state contract law.
Copyright is a federal grant of exclusive rights in an original work of authorship that has been fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Protection arises automatically the moment the work is fixed; no registration, notice, or publication is required for the right to exist. For a U.S. work, registration with the U.S. Copyright Office (or a refusal of registration) is, however, a prerequisite to filing an infringement suit. Statutory damages and attorney's fees are generally available only if the work was registered before the infringement began or within three months after first publication.
Subject matter and the fixation requirement
Section 102(a) protects original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium. Categories include literary works, musical works, dramatic works, pictorial/graphic/sculptural works, motion pictures, sound recordings, architectural works, and computer programs (treated as literary works). The originality bar is low: independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Section 102(b) excludes any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, and facts are not protected.
Exclusive rights and infringement
Section 106 grants the copyright owner the exclusive rights to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform, and display the work publicly. Infringement is established by proving ownership and copying of constituent elements that are original. Statutory damages range from $750 to $30,000 per work for ordinary infringement and up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. The court may also award attorney's fees to the prevailing party, and both remedies depend on timely registration under § 412.
Fair use after Warhol
The four-factor fair use analysis under § 107 was reframed by Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (2023). The Supreme Court held that the first factor, purpose and character of the use, turns on whether the new use shares the same commercial purpose as the original, not merely on whether it adds new expression. Where the original and the secondary use share the same or highly similar purposes and the use is commercial, the first factor is likely to weigh against fair use absent some other justification. The Court kept the transformative-use inquiry and treated it as a matter of degree. New meaning or message is relevant but not dispositive.
AI-generated works
The U.S. Copyright Office and the D.C. Circuit have held that human authorship is required for copyright protection. Thaler v. Perlmutter (D.C. Cir. 2025) affirmed the denial of registration for a work created entirely by an AI system. The Copyright Office's January 2025 guidance further clarifies that prompts alone are insufficient to make the prompter the author, but works combining AI assistance with sufficient human creative contribution remain protectable for the human-authored portions. See also Generative AI Output.
For Texas businesses, copyright most commonly affects (1) software code and databases; (2) marketing materials, photography, and website copy; (3) employee-created content and contractor work product; and (4) AI-assisted content generation. Claims arising under the Copyright Act must be brought in federal court (28 U.S.C. § 1338(a)). Registration fees run from $45 to $125 for a basic claim in one work, and statutory damages and attorney's fees depend on registering before infringement begins or within three months after first publication.