File talk:The C Programming Language, First Edition Cover.svg
Why is this considered public domain? Surely the book itself is still copyrighted, therefore the book's cover-art should still be copyrighted too. I also don't buy the rationale that it is "generic text" without a requisite amount of creativity, since at least a minimum amount of creativity had to be used by whomever designed the book's cover for Prentice Hall, the publisher of the book.
In the Sixth Circuit case Lexmark Intl Inc v. Static Control - Eastern District of Kentucky at Lexington, on page six of this opinion the court references the Supreme Court decision Feist Publ’ns, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv.Co., 499 U.S. 340, 361 (1991) with the comment that
[T]he Supreme Court has instructed that “[o]riginal . . . means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity,” even if the work is not a “novel” one.
Feist, 499 U.S. at 345–46
(originality requires both “independent creation plus a modicum of creativity”).
And although constitutionally mandated, the threshold showing of originality is not a demanding one.
Id. at 345
(“To be sure, the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice.”).
IMHO, the idea that this book's cover art is not copyrightable simply because it uses simple fonts and type-faces, (i.e. It's not sufficiently creative), is nonsense. If that were the case, then computer source code which is often printed in mono-space type - or even executable binaries for that matter - should not be copyrightable. However Congress has held that they are, regardless of how boring they might appear to be.
