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Because no matter the effort it's ultimately a factual compilation, a pure work of collecting objective facts about something in the public domain with no creat
by xoa 7y ago
Because no matter the effort it's ultimately a factual compilation, a pure work of collecting objective facts about something in the public domain with no creativity at all. Photography in general (with the exception of an exact mechanical copy attempt), precisely because it's distilling a 4D world into a 2D image, necessarily involves subjective choice in terms of framing, timing, etc. For any given event there are a limitless number of ways and specific timings/positions to try to capture it in photographs. A 3D scan of an object though is objective, an effort to put together as exact a total record of it as technologically feasible. It might be very expensive and take a lot of work, but that's not good enough.
In the USA at least, "sweat of the brow" doctrine does not legally exist for copyright. Ie., it doesn't matter at all how much work someone put into something not copyrightable, it's still not copyrightable. "Mere collections of facts" fall under this, with a classic example being a phonebook. It might (at least historically) have been an enormous amount of work to accurately collect, compile and maintain a phone listing for an area. But it would have no copyright protection. A unique and creative presentation could, but not something basic and expected like alphabetical or numeric order. This has been definitively settled by the Supreme Court.
A 3D point cloud is a mere collection of facts about the geometry of an object. If the object is already public domain that's that. You could certainly use that data to make something creative and copyrightable in a large variety of ways though.
- jdmichal 7y agoWorth mentioning that recipes cannot hold copyright in the US for this same reason. (By recipe I mean the functional list of ingredients and directions.) https://paleoflourish.com/recipe-copyright/#protected https://paleoflourish.com/recipe-copyright/#protected
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe recipe exclusion has more to do with the functional aspects limitation of copyright. That is: copyright protects authorship and expression, but not the functional properties of a work. A recipe's failures under copyright follow both from it being a factual relation (ingredients, quantities, treatment, cooking), and a result (a finished dish or baked good). Neither of these is protected under US copyright law. See: Publications International, Ltd. v. Meredith Corp.
- jdmichal 7y agoThat case is cited in the link I included, and I even called out the functional clause? I don't see what else you're trying to say? Unless the intent is that 3D scans and recipes are not alike in copyright failing, in which case all I can say is that I don't see how a point cloud is any different a collection of factual relations (points) and a result (3D object)...
- marcus_holmes 7y agoThanks for the informative answer :) There are "light field" cameras now that try to capture all the light coming from the subject, so that the photographer can make the creative decisions later. I assume you'd also be of the opinion that these should not be copyrightable? And, from the article, the file published by the museum in the article also included a copyright notice on the bottom. Which means it wasn't just a point cloud of the original, but a cleaned and altered version (I don't know what format it is in, so I don't know if it had been converted to a set of instructions). It may also include supports and struts for the model to allow overhangs. Clearly this involved some creative input, and therefore should be copyrightable. Would you agree with that?