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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."
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Will this mean racing games can finally include all the awesome cars they want, and GT can finally do proper damage sim. without risking lawsuit?
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
There goes my rights to my collection of wire frame models of cages.
I thought that stuff was gonna be gold.
As someone who has done an amount of 3d modelling, that's fine by me. It's kind of hard to claim full copyright on a point-cloud. Take Bethoven's Head for instance. It is iconic because of how often it has appeared - despite it originally being a commercial model from Viewpoint, IIRC. The head as a model however is only a few hundred points relative to each other - it is trivial to copy and disseminate raw 3D data.
The truth is that the model or wireframe is only useful if it is utilized.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
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).
Not just racing games, but any game with models based off real objects. I'm glad to see an end brought to stupidity like this.
Finally! The loophole we've all been waiting for! Yeah, baby! Re-encode your MP3's and AVI files into WIREFRAMES! We'll work on developing the player later. Let Freedom Ring!
Blessed with all the brains that God gave a duck's ass, and twice the charisma.
...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?
Make your own for a grand. Was in last month's Make Magazine from O'Rielly. All you have to do is write the software and add another camera to make it a trinocular. Same setup from the magazine would get you more than half way there.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Yeah, I'll get right on that. Maybe some nice slashdotter will volunteer, for Sourceforge fame?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
> If they're likening it TO a photograph... then it IS copyrightable just as professional
> photographers have a copyright to their photographs of "public" buildings.
Photographs are only protected by copyright to the extent that they contain creative expression. For example, the photographs in art books, which are intended to reproduce the original painting as accurately as possible, are not protected by copyright precisely because the photographers endeavor to eliminate all creative elements (of course if the original painting is still under copyright that still applies to the photo). Essentially the art-book photos are seen by the courts as copies of the original, not creative works in themselves. In a similar sense the court is saying that these models are a sort of copy of the original car rather than being creative works in themselves. A lot of work went into them, but that, according to USOC in Feist v Rural Telephone, was mere "sweat of the brow".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The summary is wrong. The court did not determine that digital models are not subject to copyright. They merely decided that these particular wireframe models (of Toyota vehicles) were not - in and of themselves - original works of authorship in which new copyright privileges rest with the modelers (MeshWerks).
The vehicle designer (Toyota) retains its design patents on the vehicles and the presumptive copyright on any creative expression reflected in the design of their vehicles. The models here are clearly derivative works. The court ruled nothing substantially new was added to grant new rights to the modelers. However, Toyota designed the vehicles, that design is reflected in immaculate detail in the models, and as such the models presumably may not be copied without Toyota's permission, barring some sort of fair use exception.
This decision rests on a landmark Supreme Court precedent called Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service (1992), in which the Court held that the lists of names, addresses, and phone numbers in telephone directories were compilations of facts not creative works of authorship protectable by copyright.
This decision opens new ground, however, suggesting that much of the contents of any comprehensive digital model of the real world (digital maps come to mind) may not be independently protectable by copyright to the degree that those contents are intended to accurately reflect pre-existing reality rather than the creative selection or arrangement of the creator.
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.
This decision cites Bridgeman vs. Corel favorably. Four times. This is important.
The key decision on "originality" in US copyright law is Feist vs. Rural Telephone. The information in lists, like telephone directories, is not a creative work and is copyrightable. You can scan in the phone book, load it into a database, and make it available on the web. Feist was a U.S. Supreme Court decision, and it created the third-party phone book industry, then made possible much useful repurposing of existing data. The decision in Feist stems from the Constitutional definition of copyright: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." The Supreme Court ruled that originality is required.
Based on Feist, a district court ruled, in Bridgeman vs. Corel, that photos of public domain paintings are not copyrightable. This opened the door to much free reuse of photos of old images, such as famous old artworks. There was much griping about Bridgeman from the museum community, one of the gripes being that it was "only" a district court decision. Well, now we have the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals saying not only that Bridgeman is good law (see p.18 of the decision), but that the concept in Bridgeman extends to 3D models of existing objects. So that's settled in US law.
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
Oh noes! Teh courts can't tell the difference between proprietary and free! We should be able to copy Toyota wireframes because Toyota is Evil Corp, but Toyota can't use our mods on the wireframe because we put them under teh GPL. Next thing you know, some dumb judge will say it's okay for RIAA to do mashups of our mashups!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!