Copyright filter: Are legal contracts subject to copyright?

November 1, 2008 3:19 AM

I want to include a sample sale-and-purchase contract in a book that I am writing. Do I need to get the approval of the lawyer (or firm) who first wrote the contract? How do I find the copyright holder? And could I resolve this by creating a composite of several different contracts? Thanks in advance.
posted by quidividi to Law & Government (2 answers total)

According to this contracts have been judged to be copyrightable before. You could approach the firm that drafted the contract in the first place (assuming such information is in the document), or just re-arrange and tweak it. By showing some originality and creativity in the arrangement, you should be safe enough. The boilerplate language on many of these sort of things reflects how hard it is to radically change the expression of certain concepts already laid down in law.
posted by ArkhanJG at 4:59 AM on November 1, 2008

Very weakly copyrightable, not something I would worry about too much. Despite the above reference I assume adapting it to your situation would be sufficient. There are public domain contract forms reachable through google.
posted by norabarnacl3 at 6:41 AM on November 1, 2008