On 11/26/06, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Careful and precise are not the standards for copyright protection. Creative is. In the case of an image which is completely from a single public domain source, there just isn't anything creative being done. You stitch together the tiles in a completely algorithmic manner. If anyone holds the copyright on the resulting work, it would be the person who chose what scene to picture (the user of the software), not the person who wrote the software. That is also the person who put the work in fixed form, another requirement for copyright protection.
I say show me the creativity. I don't see it. I actually don't see much creativity in any satellite photography, but when it comes to creativity from Google in a typical Google Earth shot, I don't see any at all.
The algorithm would be creative, which should be enough.
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.)
Would you say a painting made using a rubber stamp wasn't creative because anyone can cover stamps in paint and put them on a piece of paper? The creativity comes in making the stamp, and so, what you make with that stamp is copyrightable.
A painting made using a rubber stamp is a copy of the stamp. Not all output from computer algorithms are copies of that algorithm.
Would you say a photograph made using a camera was copyrighted by the person who wrote the firmware on the camera (the image stabilization algorithm, the sharpening algorithm, etc.)? Of course not. The algorithm is likely copyrighted by the programmer (the standard for creativity in computer software is unfortunately very low), but that doesn't mean the output of the software is copyrighted by the programmer.
Anthony