Have you ever seen a book title and thought it looked familiar? Ever ask yourself why authors and publishers can duplicate book titles? The following happens with some frequency:
Book One: Garden of beasts : a novel of Berlin 1936
Deaver, Jeffery. (copyright 2004)
Book Two: In the garden of beasts : love, terror, and an American family in Hitler's Berlin
Larson, Erik. (copyright 2011)
Can they do this? Well, it looks like they did. And there's nothing illegal about it. Book titles cannot be copyrighted.
What Can I Copyright? What Can't I Copyright?
You can copyright:
- an original creation
- which is in a tangible form
- and which falls within the U.S. Copyright Act
This includes literary works (and computer programs), art, graphics, video and audio recordings, and choreography. These works must have been preserved in order to be protected by copyright; you can't copyright a speech if you didn't record it somehow or if you don't have the transcript.
You can't copyright:
- Titles, names, short phrases and slogans
- Familiar symbols or designs, mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering or coloring
- Mere listings of ingredients or contents (but a recipe with instructions or directions can be copyrighted
- Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devises.
Can I Trademark a Book Title?
You can't copyright a book title, but you might be able to trademark that title. It depends on the title. "Garden of beasts" refers to the Tiergarten, a large public park in Berlin (the name is German for "garden of animals"), and this phrase is a common usage, so it's unlikely that the title is original enough to be trademarked.
More questions about copyrights? Read my article on What You Should Know about Copyrights.
More about trademarks and service marks.
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