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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

  If it's legal to do it in photos and videos,
  it's legal to do it in 3D models.

Perhaps it ought to be by extension but apparently it's far from a settled matter.

I mean, our copyright laws are full of weird seeming-contradictions. Games companies pay to license an athlete's likeness, but photographers don't? Photographs of a sculpture are copyright-protected, but photographs of tattoos aren't? Architecture with an expired copyright can be lit up with lights to regain copyright protection?

Copyright law isn't really amenable to deducing that one thing is legal just because another very similar thing is legal.

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Not just copyright law. Look at the difference in laws being recording a video of a person and recording sound of the same person. I would love for law to be consistent, but as of yet there is no such requirement.

For more headfuckery, try to work out if you can record a video of the soundwaves.

You can. You record a high definition video of items and can possibly determine the sound waves from the movement of the items. I've already seen demos of this tech where you can restore the majority of a transcript of a visually recorded conversation.

You technically can, but then it becomes illegal in most states.

Is there any case law on this? Given it is a recording of video, not audio, how does the law treat the ability to convert video into audio? This would make most video recordings where audio is illegal to also be illegal, if it is so directly applied.

Another fun legal question is what happens if I add fake audio to a video where the video is legal but the audio isn't, but I use legal audio recordings to fake the voice of the person I videotaped? Does it matter if the injected audio is close enough to what was originally said (say I remembered the words while I recorded the video)?

I assumed the post I responded to discussing actually converting it to audio rather than merely recording something that could theoretically be converted to audio. In that case, it's just a different type of photo-microphone, which is well established as audio recording.

A photographer has to deal with publicity rights as well.

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