Originality and Creativity in Copyright Law

Copyright law can be broadly viewed as a system that seeks an appropriate balance between the rights of authors and publishers with the rights of users and consumers. The case of Feist Publications Inc vs Rural Telephone Service Co is discussed

On the contribution of adaptation to originality in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and the history of art

This article assesses the manner in which the gesture of adaptation affects notions of originality. Through its fluctuations, the adaptive process can generate divergent thinking about the question of originality. Adaptation appears resourceful for the purposes of originality when it produces innovative works of art by modifying adopted sources. At the same time, any claim towards originality can be compromised whenever the exercise of adaptation turns out to be overtly dependent on the adoptive sources. To this extent, in the first part of the essay, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus is deployed as a means of exploring whether the novel's bid towards originality is undermined by the adaptation ofthe Faust theme. What further limits the novel's effectiveness as an "original" is the possibility that the protagonist ofthe novel, Adrian Leverkiihn, may be perceived as an adaptation of Friedrich Nietzsche's own biography. The second part of this study investigates whether the work, through the adaptation of recurring motifs in the history of art, can bring about original arrangements in works of art.peer-reviewe

Influence, originality and similarity in directed acyclic graphs

We introduce a framework for network analysis based on random walks on directed acyclic graphs where the probability of passing through a given node is the key ingredient. We illustrate its use in evaluating the mutual influence of nodes and discovering seminal papers in a citation network. We further introduce a new similarity metric and test it in a simple personalized recommendation process. This metric's performance is comparable to that of classical similarity metrics, thus further supporting the validity of our framework.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Quanta: The Originality of Einstein's Approach to Relativity?

We suggest that not only quanta may have played a role in Einstein's ideas on relativity, but that they themselves may be related to the dynamical and relativistic behaviour of the electromagnetic field exhibited in a Poincar\'e's 1900 paper, in particular to the identical transformation law of energy and frequency for bounded plane waves

Originality of thought and method in West African Islamic teaching: a Fulfulde example

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 3

What is creative to whom and why? Perceptions in advertising agencies

The authors apply recent advances in creativity theory to discover perceptual differences in the factors of strategy, originality, and artistry among creatives and noncreatives. It was found that current advertising position influences subjective perceptions of what constitutes creative advertising. Creatives tend to perceive advertisements as more appropriate if they are artistic, but account executives tend to perceive advertisements as more appropriate if they are strategic. The study also indicates that creatives have a distinctive preference for a strong originality component to strategy. To be original within the confines of a tight strategy is perceived as the most creative by advertising creatives. Account executives are so focused on strategy, they will often accept artistic advertisements as a substitute for truly original work. The authors consider future research implications of the study and its limitations

The influence of advertisement familiarity and originality on visual attention and brand memory.

Based on Mandler's theory of schema organization and previous visual attention research, we formulate and test hypotheses about the impact of ad familiarity and ad originality on attention and memory for print advertisements. To that end, one hundred and nineteen consumers browsed through two consumer magazines containing 68 print advertisements. Attention to the ads and their brand, picture and text components was assessed through infrared eye tracking. Trained judges rated the ads independently for familiarity and originality. In support of the hypotheses we find a sharp attention decline with ad familiarity, which is largely due to a reduction in attention to text. Originality of ad execution serves as a buffer against the negative influence of ad familiarity on attention, but only for the brand and picture components. The reduction of attention to the text is even larger for original than for unoriginal ads. Moreover, over and above their indirect influence through visual attention patterns, ad familiarity, ad originality and their interaction had a direct influence on brand memory.Advertising;