On 11/26/06, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Depends on the purpose of the algorithm. If the purpose of the algorithm is, for instance, to simulate as accurately as possible the curvature of earth, then while the algorithm itself might be creative, and worthy of copyright, the resulting output wouldn't be. (If the purpose of the algorithm is to make a pretty picture, then it probably would be.)
It sounds like you're saying copyright depends on the intention of the creator - I'm not sure that's true. If the output is the same, it shouldn't matter if it was intended to be an accurate representation or intended to look pretty. It's the same piece of work, created the same way, so it has the same copyright.
Well, I certainly shouldn't have been saying that copyright depends on the intention of the creator, because I'm fairly sure case law disagrees with me on that one. If the purpose of the algorithm were simply to make a pretty picture, and the output of it happened to be an extremely accurate representation of the curvature of the earth - well, I really don't have any clue what the courts would say. But it doesn't matter, because the chances of that are pretty much nil.
In the hypothetical I'm talking about, I assume the purpose is to make an accurate representation of the curvature of the earth, and that the algorithm succeeds in serving that purpose.
We're getting a bit too hypothetical, though. I don't have the source code to Google Earth sitting in front of me (and even if I did I wouldn't care enough to thoroughly examine every line), so I really can only really speculate as to what they're doing to manipulate the imagery they receive from others. One interesting thing to look at is just how much Google Earth screeshots differ from 1) World Wind screenshots; and 2) the real thing - from that location and angle. Of course, once you've done that, for the purposes of Wikipedia, you might as well just use one of the two "safe" images.
Anthony