Eligibility for copyright protection, or, more colloquially, copyrightability,
is one of the major components of the balance drawn by copyright law
between the competing claims of copyright owners and copyright users. 7 The
question of originality, the threshold standard of qualification for copyright
protection, is at the core of copyrightability.8 Defining or redefining this
threshold standard has serious consequences for the copyright system. If the
standards for a work to be considered original, and thus qualify for copyright
protection, are raised or lowered, both the number and types of works that
can claim copyright protection will change. Thus what is at stake in any
definition or redefinition of originality is the coverage of the copyright
monopoly and the balance between copyright owners and users at its most
basic level