Originality in Copyright and the Judicial Jurisprudence in Ethiopia
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Date
2018-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Intellectual property law is part of the law that protects intellectual creations of the human mind.
As such, creations assume the central part in the study of the law. Copyright, being one of the
property rights in creations requires that any work to be protected should be original. The
originality obligation is nothing but the mechanism through which the law ascertains the
existence or otherwise of creation. Albeit there seems to be no commonly applicable standard of
it, the requirement of originality in a work for protection is almost universally recognized.
Defining originality assumes greater importance in copyright law mainly because it determines
which works get protection and which wouldn’t. By the same parlance, the threshold of
originality directly impacts the nature and types of works that get copyright protection. To this
end, different jurisdictions describe the requirement based on their unique understanding of the
concept and due regard to the purpose of copyright.
By virtue of the Ethiopian copyright and neighboring right protection proclamation, only original
works in the fields of literature, art and culture are protected without defining what constitutes
originality.
Assessment of originality by federal courts shows that they took originality to mean novelty and
rule that only new works or those, which differ by their nature from previous works, are
protected by copyright. Besides, the similarity test is widely practiced as a mechanism of
ascertaining originality between works. Finally, courts seem to be oblivious to the existence or
otherwise of creativity in a work in the calculation of originality. Such understanding of
originality has detached itself from both established jurisprudence and nature of copyright.
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Originality in Copyright