While courts have disagreed about whether or not individual statements uttered during interviews are copyrightable, no court has suggested that interviews overall are not copyrightable. Several options for dealing with interview copyrights have been presented by the courts. As outlined in this Note, each of these proposed solutions has serious problems, either doctrinally or consequentially. Therefore, this Note proposes that the question of ownership of copyright interests should be approached by looking at the interview as a whole, complete work in of itself, rather than a piecemeal compilation of quotes from separate authors. By looking at the interview as a whole, and the role in crafting that whole, the authorship of the interviewer’s interviewer as the of the work becomes clear, suggesting that the entire copyright “mastermind” interest should belong to the interviewer as the author of the work.
While courts have disagreed about whether or not individual statements uttered during interviews are copyrightable, no court has suggested that interviews overall are not copyrightable. Several options for dealing with interview copyrights have been presented by the courts. As outlined in this Note, each of these proposed solutions has serious problems, either doctrinally or consequentially. Therefore, this Note proposes that the question of ownership of copyright interests should be approached by looking at the interview as a whole, complete work in of itself, rather than a piecemeal compilation of quotes from separate authors. By looking at the interview as a whole, and the interviewer’s role in crafting that whole, the authorship of the interviewer as the “mastermind” of the work becomes clear, suggesting that the entire copyright interest should belong to the interviewer as the author of the work.