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

That sound you hear....

[symbolset]

Is millions of wireframe models being yanked from the Internet. Gentlemen... start your Blenders!

Actually, apparently the court ruled that the modellers didn't own the copyright because it's a representation of Toyota's design. I doubt if you got hold of this mesh and published it that you could avoid getting sued by Toyota.

Oh, and I wonder if it will grow the market for this clever device.

While we're on the subject... where's a great free library of blender-compatible models?

I hear some clever japanese gents are working on autogenerating wireframe models from multiple pictures like you find on Google street view as well.

open source 3D MMORPG

[je ne sais quoi]

For a long time now, I've wondered about license or copyright on the community models for a game like, e.g., Neverwinter Nights, who owns the copyright? If this is to be believed, no one does. Maybe now we can get an open source MMORPG that looks decent. Of course, the bitmaps are images so are probably copyrighted, which is a huge part of the work but maybe there's hope.