Comment by webmaven

>> Right, I'm thinking specifically of code like shaders that do produce copyrighted content.

> What do you mean by this exactly?

Sorry for the delayed reply.

Procedural content is generally produced by code that generates somewhat randomized 'assets' on the fly, whether it is a generated map of game locations, a generated planetary system, generated alien plant & creatures, buildings and cities, people and clothing, weapon/robot/vehicle designs, etc.

The generating code can be just code, or sometimes the code recombines existing assets. In the latter case omitting the assets is sufficient for the purposes of distinguishing assets from code (without the assets in the first place, there is nothing for the code to recombine).

But the former case, where assets are procedurally generated (materials, textures, models, bump maps, locations, etc.) from code alone, is the more interesting one.

It is fairly clear that art assets being generated on-demand likely embody a game-specific look and feel that is subject to the usual copyright, trademark and trade dress issues even though any specific image doesn't exist ahead of time.

So if there is code that generates (within constraints) randomized textures used in the game, how do you see that code and the resulting assets being licensed?

Perhaps the code itself is treated like all the other code in the game, but the settings data that steers the generating code toward a particular 'look' is separated out and treated as an asset?