this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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Fortunately copyright depends on publication, so the text simply pre-existing somewhere won't ruin everything.
Unless you don't like copyright, in which case it's "unfortunately."
That is not correct. Copyright subsists in all original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102
Legally, when you write your shopping list, you instantly have the rights to that work, no publication or registration necessary. You can choose to publish it later, or not at all, but you still own the rights. Someone can't break into your house, look at your unpublished works, copy them, and publish them like they're their originals.
No, a list of facts like a shopping list is not under copyright protection.
If you wrote the list as a poem, you could claim it, though.
Right, but it's not a pure list of facts. When you set it to paper, it's unique, and you could argue it's art. In fact, a quick Google search found one such example: https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Shopping-list-1/2146403/10186433/view
Granted, that one was presumably intended to be a work of art on creation and your weekly shopping list isn't, but the intent during creation isn't all that important for US copyright law. You create it, you get the rights.
Here's the ruling.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.^article^ ^|^ ^about^