It seems like it comes down to the content, not the form. If I arrange a scene with a bowl of fruit on my dog's head and take a photograph of it, or a 3D scan o

It seems like it comes down to the content, not the form. If I arrange a scene with a bowl of fruit on my dog's head and take a photograph of it, or a 3D scan of it, I can call it a creative work either way. If a photographer operating a photo booth at a party can claim copyright on the photos, then someone making 3D scans of party guests as they pose should be able to claim copyright also. Taking a 3D scan of a random building should be just as copyrightable as taking a photo of the same building. One could argue that neither should be copyrightable, but all the photographers I know would say any photo they take is "creative work", even if it was done with a smartphone camera in auto mode. If simply framing or cropping a photograph is what makes a photo creative, the same concept scales to 3 dimensions just as easily. You have to decide how much of the building to capture, whether to include the parking lot, the nearby power lines, etc. With a bulk capture of geography, I suppose the photographic equivalent of a 3D scan would be aerial photography or Google's street view or something. Is that copyrightable? I assume Google and other companies act like it is. Someone had to decide the resolution and precision to capture at, at least.