Manifesto Of The Desperate: A Case Study

Now we will move on to discuss each scenario in detail to determine which member has the respective works copyright, starting with the Communart’s manifesto, entitled ‘Manifesto of the Desperate: Finding the Good Life in a Ruthless World’. The members involved in the project of the manifesto are Al, Bill, Cal and Dina. Seeing as their written manifesto is in the process of a possible publishing deal, they each would like to have claim of copyright over the manifesto. The manifesto will be a literary work due to the nature of it being recorded in writing and the 15 core rules has been clearly written out for reading. This sort of work need not to have great quality but as long as it has been expressed in writing, copyright should be attained. Each member would argue that they have made momentous contribution to have copyright but that will need to be assessed separately for a better

Firstly, Al had suggested the idea and the title for the manifesto but as previously discussed, it’s unfortunate because the idea will not be copyrighted. And for the title suggested, providing copyright for such a trivial work would seem unreasonable and the courts will rely on the de minimis non curat lex to ascertain that the work is not enough to gain copyright. This de minimis principle helps in distinguishing the relevant work that should be allowed and here, the title could not amount to original literary work. Moving on, it may be doubtful for Dina, who did the final editing to have a claim of copyright. She barely had a significant contribution plus her act of editing grammar and spelling errors would show the she may had put in some skill, judgement and labour but while copying another person’s work and this would not be fitting to originality . Dina will fail to have any authorship in the manifesto, much like