That was a terrible ruling. It should be about who got the camera there and set it up, not who pushed the button. With automated recording (dashcams) there isn't even "a button."
Hopefully no judge uses that as precedence.
Hopefully no judge uses that as precedence.
I'm actually having a bit of trouble thinking of what sufficient societal good there is/would be in granting copyright on raw dashcam or security camera or the like footage? None of those purely mechanical automated systems need a subsidy or encouragement to generate more. Certainly someone can use that sort of thing in the creation of a copyrighted work but what would be the issue with the underlying material in that case being unprotected?
For what it’s worth, dashcam footage can absolutely be copyrightable.
The ruling is more about “only humans can get copyright protection”, not so much anything about whether a button is pressed or not.
Details https://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/gnu/www/philosophy/words-to-avoid.h...
The overwhelming majority of works have an effective commercial life of less than ten years.
Present-value analysis further reduces the individual benefit of long-lived copyright. That is warrented in only a minuscule fraction of all works.
(There are roughly 1 million books published in English annually, of which ... ten make the top-ten best-seller list. The situation gets worse if we consider this a conservative estimate, or include all other copyrighted works created in a year ... every one of the billion or so items posted to social media accounts on a near-daily basis is protected by copyright. Few if any of those have any real commercial value. The fraction of works fostered vs. works encumbered by copyright is parlous small.)
Copyright is a fairly basic protection on Work, and wanting to alter it to be based on percived value is catastrophic- On one end you'll deny copyright to security camera footage- nevermind it's of a meteorite and everybody is clamoring for a copy. Then, on the other hand you'll have micky mouse where it's such a big thing and Walt put so much effort into it that the copyright is perpetual. It'll tie up the courts, and give the Have's the power to remove the copyright or SLAPP the rightsholder into poverty.
We need patent reform far more than any complaint against Copyright that I've seen- and far too many people conflate the two. Lets not even talk about trademarks.
In any case, any country that decides neural network generated media isn't copyrighted then faces a major, and probably impossible, problem of trying to prove it wasn't made by a human.
That doesn't stop people from treating automated recordings as if they were copyrighted, though. Especially for media companies, licensing is standard operating procedure. Even if a media company's lawyers believe something isn't actually copyrightable, if the licensor and licensee believe it is, and especially if distribution outlets (e.g. YouTube) treat it as such, then it all works out.
In some other countries automated footage is copyrightable, AFAIU, but it varies.
> In any case, any country that decides neural network generated media isn't copyrighted then faces a major, and probably impossible, problem of trying to prove it wasn't made by a human.
In the US the initial burden is on the person claiming a copyright violation. In court that is met by simply showing a certificate from the Copyright Office. In fact, it's actually a requirement--you can't sue in court to enforce a copyright claim with a certificate. But in getting the certificate you would be making a declaration that it was made by a human.
Registering a work provides additional benefits.
That’s it.
What if this applied in a photography class? The instructor owns the equipment and helped “set up” the photo. Does the instructor own the copyright?
It's fine, I guess. How does it work in cinema? A director who is the creator of the project must have to get rights from every camera/mic operator.
No, because they're already paid to do that job. And a director is paid too - he doesn't have any copyright for his work. The employer does.
> In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is created by an employee as part of their job duties, the employer is considered the legal author or first owner of copyright.
> It is an exception to the general rule that the person who actually creates a work is the legally-recognized author of that work.
If employment is an exception, I wonder what would happen if an animal that you owned pressed the shutter on a camera.
So you're more of trying to create a special rule where if the normal recipient of a copyright would be invalid, then it slides to the 'nearest' most appropriate individual, but that seems extremely fragile and difficult to define.
Same as when hiring a software engineer.