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Comment by ukoki | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Makes me wonder if you could train a machine learning model to take one or more football match video streams as input and turn them into a live 3d model. You then argue that the model simply documents the facts of the game, so does not infringe on the copyright of the original source streams. Then you sell live footage of the model (perhaps with slightly different camera angles)

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Makes me wonder if you could train a machine learning model to take one or more football match video streams as input and turn them into a live 3d model.

It's been done.[1] Not for American football, for soccer.

[1] https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/soccer/soccer_on_yo...

> does not infringe on the copyright of the original source streams

Unless you're getting the raw video stream from all the cameras, it'll be transformed through the producer and director's creative control and that, I suspect, would block you from doing this - it's not longer just "facts", it's a particular interpretation of those "facts" (cf bare recounting of historical events vs someone's book covering the same, I suppose.

> it'll be transformed through the producer and director's creative control and that, I suspect, would block y

I don’t know about that. You’re using the directors production to establish the fact but once you have extruded those facts, it could be argued in principal of not legally that this is a new creative work based off the mere facts.

The "mere facts" would be a wide-angled camera showing the entire pitch and very few people would watch that, I think. Using your judgement as a director/producer to use different angles, cameras, positions, etc. to provide a more interesting spectacle would, for me (IANAL), be transformative enough.

Consider an analogy to classical music - Beethoven's 5th isn't copyrighted but a particular expression of it by an orchestra can be.

It would be a case to be heard in court no doubt. It could be argued that the footage is but one corroborating account of events in the dream theatre. All it would take would be to independently capture some off camera activity. Director has to assert that somehow your work is derivative. I’m not a lawyer of course and if you are I defer to your expertise. It’s an interesting thought experiment none the less.

Where they could get you is how they can protect their "likeness." If you reduced the simulation to only functional aspects of the game, then I don't see how it'd be a problem.

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