alt Hacker News> The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that copyright law exists to incentivize human acts of creative expression.
The US Constitution grants Congress the power to grant copyrights "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts." Creative expression that is not useful therefore is not constitutionally copyrightable.
But that aside, I agree with the author that the Copyright Office refusing to further expand the already vastly over-expanded scope of copyrights is a rare positive ruling.
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"Useful Arts" is old timey talk for the mechanical trades. Engineering, manufacturing and that kind of thing. It applies to "Inventors" and their "Discoveries," and is the basis of patent law.
There is another clause later tha clarifies it a bit. It does NOT mean that an invention must be useful, and it's pretty clear that purely l utilitarian objects actually can not be copyrighted.
You have left out the second half of the sentence, "... by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The position taken by the courts and the administration is that "authors and inventors" means "human". The monkey could not be the author of its own selfie photograph, for instance.
Maybe this doesn't reflect the intentions of the Framers, but it certainly should color any modern discussion surrounding the purpose of copyright law.