Scènes à faire

Scène à faire (French for "scene to be made" or "scene that must be done"; plural: scènes à faire) is a scene in a book or film which is almost obligatory for a genre of its type. In the U.S. it also refers to a principle in copyright law in which certain elements of a creative work are held to be not protected when they are mandated by or customary to the genre.

For example, a spy novel is expected to contain elements such as numbered Swiss bank accounts, a femme fatale, and various spy gadgets hidden in wristwatches, belts, shoes, and other personal effects. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit interpreted the scènes à faire doctrine expansively to hold that a motion picture about the South Bronx would need to feature drunks, prostitutes, vermin, and derelict cars to be perceived as realistic, and therefore a later film that duplicated these features of an earlier film did not infringe. These elements are not protected by copyright, though specific sequences and compositions of them can be.

As another example, in computer programming, it is often customary to list variables at the beginning of the source code of a program. In some programming languages, it is required to also declare the type of variable at the same time. Depending on the function of a program, certain types of variables are to be expected. If a program deals with files, variable types that deal with files are often listed and declared. As a result, variable declarations are generally not considered protected elements of a program. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit made this part of the analysis for infringement of non-literal elements of computer code in Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc. 982 F.2d 693. In that case, the court added it into its Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test.

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