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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.
There goes my rights to my collection of wire frame models of cages.
I thought that stuff was gonna be gold.
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).
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.
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.
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.
There is a free program called David that allows you to use a webcam, laser level, and some markers for reference to generate a 3d model. You have to be patient and make quite a few passes with the laser but the reults are pretty good.