Does copyright protect techniques or methods?
No. Copyright protects only expression, not ideas. So while copyright might protect one author’s description of a bookkeeping method, it does not prevent others from using the method or copying the forms needed to use it. This “idea/expression dichotomy” is spelled out in part in the Copyright Act’s Section 102(b): “In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
