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NO COPYRIGHT FOR WORKS THAT LACK ORIGINALITY
In a 2004 criminal appeal judgment, the Supreme Court stated that for a work to enjoy protection under the Copyright Act, the work must exhibit "originality". The judgment points out that Article 3 Paragraph 1 Subparagraph 1 of the Act defines a work as a creation within a literary, scientific, artistic or other intellectual domain. Thus "work" means an intellectual work created by an author, and an intellectual work, in addition to meeting the criteria of being an expression of thought or emotions and having a definite form of expression, must also possess originality. Furthermore, what is protected under the Copyright Act is the form of expression of a work; the concepts themselves are not protected. This is clearly stipulated in Article 10-1 of the Act, which provides: "Protection of copyright acquired under this Act shall extend only to the expression of the work concerned, and not to ideas, procedures, production processes, systems, methods of operation, concepts, principles, or discoveries expressed by the work."
On the question of the originality of Japa-nese-language product literature for cosmetics, which was at issue in the case before the court, the judgment further stated that if product lit-erature contains merely simple descriptions of the mode of use, application, or features of the product concerned, or if the common character-istics of the modes of use or the applications of similar products make it necessary to use the same or similar descriptions, because the mode of expression is highly limited, such text does not possess originality, and thus is not protected by the Copyright Act. The wording of the Japa-nese-language user instructions for the product concerned was of a kind widely used in the cosmetics industry, and the mode of expression was highly limited and devoid of originality. As for the Japanese-language product description, it consisted of advertising language and habitual wording widely used by cosmetics firms, and amounted to no more than a simple description of the product's application and features, of a kind that could easily be prepared by a person fluent in Japanese. The level of intellectual en-deavor involved was very low, and was not suf-ficient to express the personality and uniqueness of the author. The text lacked originality and thus was not protected by the Copyright Act.