Can pricing be copyrighted?
<p>Say a service is offered with pricing for 1 hour, 2 hours ... 12 hours. Assume there is some sort of custom calculation used to determine discounts after the first hour (e.g. if the first hour is $100, the second hour isn't necessarily $200 -- it would be less, and subsequent hours would be progressively less).</p>

<p>If a competitor copies the exact pricing structure -- could that possibly considered copyright infringement?</p>

<p>No.</p>

<p>The "pricing structure" here is essentially an algorithm. <a href="https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/28975/can-code-logic-be-copyrighted/28986#28986">It can be patented but not copyrighted</a>.</p>

<p>No. This is covered in the United States in section <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102" rel="noreferrer">102(b)</a> of the copyright act, and similar doctrine applies in pretty much every other country too. It's usually referred to as the "idea-expression" dichotomy: ideas are not protected by copyright; only the way those ideas are expressed are protected. The pertinent statutory text reads:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>In no case does copyright protection for an original work of
  authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of
  operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in
  which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such
  work.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>This doctrine goes all the way back to an 1879 Supreme Court case, <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/101/99/" rel="noreferrer"><em>Baker v. Selden</em>, 101 U.S. 99 (1879)</a>, where Charles Selden published a book describing an accounting system, with ledgers, and obtained a copyright; and then asserted that his copyright covered the actual system. He lost. Wikipedia has a fairly good <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v._Selden" rel="noreferrer">write-up on the case</a>.</p>

copyright intellectual-property