Comment by xoa
14 days ago
>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".
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?
I am in favor of copyright reform so eventually it becomes something like two years automatic with a one time two year extension possible an I agree with you because of one key word — raw. Once the footage is used in a package, be it a movie, a news report, or a music video, that package can be copyrighted. The problem is there is no way the owner of a dashcam can prohibit commercial use of a video they own if it cannot be copyrighted in the US. In a way, we have conflated copyrights with other so called intellectual property (details). Maybe the solution is to strengthen privacy rights somehow? I'm not sure.
Details https://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/gnu/www/philosophy/words-to-avoid.h...
people freqently spend more than two years trying to get something published.
Two years might be too short.
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.)
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Not on YouTube.
A dashcam could be a safety tool for most people, but it could also be a strategically placed B-cam for a videographer on a shoot.
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.
Thinking more about monkeys, I think that case was made relatively easy because there was a normal living recipient for copyright, but that wasn't eligible for such. I'm fairly certain that dashcam footage, which is 100% automated, as you mention, is copyrighted by default. It's a fairly common source of footage of novel events like a meteorite, rocket impact, or whatever else. And that footage is licensed to media companies.
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.
Theoretically, in the US dashcam, CCTV, and similar automated recordings are not copyrightable. In the US you can only copyright creative expression. However, the question hasn't been answered in court, yet, AFAIU.
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.
Copyright is automatic upon creation.
Registering a work provides additional benefits.
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There is a spark of creativity in the monkey case that very often doesn’t apply to dashcam footage
Somebody exerted effort.
That’s it.