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PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS NOT PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
Copyright protection extends only to the ex-pression of a work; it does not protect the ideas, procedures, manufacturing processes, systems, modes of operation, concepts, principles or dis-coveries so expressed. This is provided by Ar-ticle 10-1 of the Copyright Law. But there has been considerable dispute in practice as to whether the law still protects a work when the possible means of expressing the content are highly limited, or when there is only one possible form of expression, so that the form of expres-sion and the concepts expressed are inseparably combined.
In a recent criminal judgment, the Tainan Dis-trict Court, citing two precedent criminal appeals judgments of the Taiwan High Court, held that textual statements in a product catalogue were nothing more than simple descriptions of the method of use, function, or characteristics of the products concerned. Although their arrangement in a particular order in the catalogue was a mode of expression, it was limited by the fact that the number of possible layouts was limited, and it did not have any special editorial meaning. Therefore such a mode of expression should not be interpreted as falling within the scope of protection afforded by the Copyright Law. Furthermore, the possible ways of stating the performance and specifications of products were limited, making it extremely difficult to distin-guish the concepts from the expression; for this reason too, such a form of expression was not protected.