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Whoa. I sit corrected. "the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any
by ISL 4y ago
Whoa. I sit corrected.
"the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author." would appear to come pretty close to excluding school portraits from copyright, too.
Interesting that it, per the linked article, hasn't yet been tested in US courts.
- YPPH 4y agoYou've raised a good point in relation to school portraits. Perhaps creative effort is a result of direction from the photographer (smile?).
- ISL 4y agoLighting, focus, posing, etc. matters too for school portraits -- my actual point is that, from a photographer's perspective, medical imaging seems like it would fall under copyright, too. There is direction and configuration that goes into arranging the patient, correctly operating the imaging system, and interpreting the results to verify that the medical-imaging needs are met. I'm surprised to hear that medical imaging is handled differently by the Copyright Office. Instagram's most popular images are frequently formulaic -- is that not a mechanical process, too?
- YPPH 4y agoI guess we will only know when a court determines the issue. I am having a great deal of difficulty seeing how an X-ray differs from ordinary photography where the shot is pre-set but nevertheless subject to some human decision-making. It's just different photographic technology that enables transparency. I was under the understanding the creativity requirement was very low, and that simply the choice of the area to X-ray would suffice. Clearly, the Copyright Office disagrees with that assesment.
- littlestymaar 4y agoNobody said it doesn't require any work, but the question is whether the said work is a creative process. School photographs would likely be given the benefit of the doubt, because most of their non-school pictures are creative work, but thr same cannot be said for dentists…
- jacquesm 4y agoThere are lots of things that haven't been tested in US courts, this may not necessarily be a signal of ambiguity though, it usually means the exact opposite: that all parties that might ever be involved in such a suit are all confident in the outcome leading the 'loser' to see the error of their ways without the court saying it is so.