Digital Models Not Subject To Copyright

MonsterMagnet writes "The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit has affirmed (PDF) a ruling that a plain, unadorned wireframe model of a Toyota vehicle is not a creative expression protected under copyright law. The court analogized the wire-frame models to photographs: the owner of an object does not have a copyright in all images of the object, but a photographer may have a limited copyright over a particular image based on artistic choices such as costumery, lighting, posing, etc. Thus, the modelers could only copyright any 'incremental contribution' they made to Toyota's vehicles; in the case of plain models, there was nothing new to protect. This could be a two-edged sword — companies that produce goods may not be able to stop modelers from imaging those products, but modelers may not be able to prevent others from copying their work."

Comments

Re:The headline is confusing

[cpt kangarooski]

The headline says that the wireframes are not subject to copyright, and that the judge used an analogy to photographs. But photographs are subject to copyright, so I'm very confused.

Photographs can be copyrightable, but it doesn't mean that all photographs necessarily are copyrightable.

The central issue for copyrightability is creativity; did the author actually originate the work in question, and is it creative? If the work did not originate with the author, but was instead just copied from somewhere, or if the work lacks creativity, then it is not copyrightable. In photography, creative choices tend to involve choice of subject, angle, lighting, pose, etc. Even if a photograph is of an uncopyrightable thing (e.g. a rock picked up from the ground) the way that the picture is taken can provide enough creativity to support a copyright on the picture (though not the subject, of course). A photograph that slavishly reproduces the object embodies all the creativity of ordinary xerox machine use, and would not be copyrightable.

Here, the model presumably seeks to slavishly conform to the exact shape and dimensions of the car. That's not creative. If it were creatively different from the car, then that could be something copyrightable... but probably not what anyone wants.

If you're interested in this, read the Feist decision, which is about the uncopyrightability of a standard phone book's white pages: the phone company didn't author the names or numbers, and didn't creatively select or arrange them (it used them all, alphabetically) and so opened the doors to anyone copying phone listings. Creative, copyrightable phone books exist, but the all-inclusive unimaginatively ordered white pages are not they.