A Comparative Study of the Legal Status of Factual Works in Iranian and US Law

The use of the words "Author", "Creator" and "Creation" under the definition of "Work" in Article 1 of the Law on Protection of the Rights of Authors, Writers and Artists (1348) indicates that the existence of the element of creation in works is required in order to protect them. This issue poses a serious challenge to the protection of factual works. Factual works are works that include compilation and narration of facts, photographs, and geographical maps that describe facts or aspects of the world in which we live, e.g.  data and information about the world that are discovered and are not the result of the act of creation. Due to their extensive composition of factual material of the public domain, as well as the requirements for accurate narration of facts in some instances, such as biographies and histories, these works face significant uncertainty in distinguishing between "Fact" and "Factual Expression". The present study by using a descriptive-analytic method in examining the legal status of factual works and a comparative study of achieving originality in different types of these works in American law, due to their different nature, seeks to express the status of this issue in Iranian law and concludes that Iranian law has failed to recognize the distinctive nature of these works.