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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."
Um. No. The last unsupported statement in the summary is at least half wrong: "companies that produce goods may not be able to stop modelers from imaging those products."
This case says nothing about this point. The companies may have copyrights, design patents, trademarks, etc. The fact that someone hired to make lifelike reproductions using wire meshes has no copyright in the work doesn't mean that no one has rights in it.
In any event, the real effect is pretty obvious: modelers should just charge MORE for their work so that they're fully compensated for the work product purchased by the company. Meshworks made a mistake in this case; they assumed that their work would be a loss-leader for the other portion of the work awarded to another company.
As for racing games, assuming that the modeling is done in-house, there will be no effect on price. If its done by a thrid party, it'll be MORE expensive (a cost ultimately passed along to you, the consumer).
...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.
Sounds like win-win to me.
What?
> I doubt if you got hold of this mesh and published it that you could avoid getting sued
> by Toyota.
Do you think you would be sued by Toyota if you published a photograph of one of a car manufactured by them?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The article is talking about high quality models, but he's not.. he's talking about low poly game models.
One day, computer vision will be so good that you can give it a single photograph, it'll grind away for a few minutes and create an entire 3d world containing every object in the photograph, a mesh of the terrain, etc. You'll load it up in your favourite 3d game and apples will act like apples and cars will act like cars, etc. You'll be able to feed a 100 minute film into a much bigger machine running a much more complicated collection of algorithms and it will automatically generate a 3d world where all the same events happen in the world as happened in the film. You can choose how you want to participate in the action and your actions will have consequences on the plot line that are dynamic and non-fragile.
And the last thing you will be thinking is "man, that car model has a few too many jaggy polygons in it."
How we know is more important than what we know.
The ruling is that a digital model is not subject to copyright. An original design, on the other hand, is subject to copyright or possibly 'trade dress' rights.
IOW, if I make a model of something existing -- there's no copyright protection. If I make a model of a nifty new product or a new design for a building, then that design is copyrighted, but the model is not.
It sounds like I'm splitting hairs here, but I'm not.
My blog
I'm unclear. (TFA doesn't make it clear.)
Obviously, the company that made the model doesn't own the copyright on the shape. That, I honestly expected. But does this mean that (in this case,) Toyota doesn't hold the copyright on the raw shape, either?
i.e. I could go and create a car that has 100% the visible shape of the Toyota Prius, but as long as I change enough details (maybe a full-top glass roof, get rid of the hatchback, and obviously not use any Toyota trademarks,) that it would be 100% legal?
So how does this bode for the famous "Coca Cola bottle shape"?
While the raw shape apparently can't be copyrighted, would it still be covered under trademark?
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
No, it won't be. Even if you assumed it could infer the geometry as well as human (remember, you're talking about a single photo here, so it wouldn't have any parallax to go on and would have to rely on a library of "previous experience" instead), it would still have no information for any occluded objects. Even a human can't tell what's on the other side of a brick wall!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That already exists. It's called real life. I realise this is news for most slashdotters.
No, seriously, the modeling-from-photographs part already exists and it's called photogrammetry. But, just as a human needs multiple points of view to avoid making mistakes, so will (do) computers; there just isn't enough information in a single 2D photo, unless every single object in the scene is "known" (which rather limits the use of the system).
As to the rest, you'd have to couple photogrammetry with object identification and a (really, really, really good) physics simulation. Oh, and AI good enough to figure out the consequences of your actions in that "virtual world that's just like the real world", meaning the "supercomputer" would have to a) be able to simulate the minds of all the people in the "game" and b) it would have to be able to simulate itself (since it's part of the "real world"). Good luck with that.
Anyway, the real question is: what for? Do you really want to be able to change your point of view during a movie (insert pr0n joke here)? That's why good directors and cinematographers get the big bucks: to make that choice for you, and deliver a "message" through a consistent work. Pan the camera up during the first scene and you solve the murder mystery in 2 minutes. Not much fun.
Maybe one day computers will be able to analyse Van Gogh's sunflowers and deliver a 3D model of real sunflowers, plus some paint, some paintbrushes, and a large bottle of absinthe, so you can paint them from any other angle... :-P