The question is what is the limit of the creative input? If you sit someone or something down and tell them to draw, do you own the copyright or who/whatever did the drawing?
Who owns the copyright in a collaboration is irrelevent to the legal question of whether something is copyrightable.
The answer to your question is, if an artist teams with someone telling them what to draw, ownership might depend on whether they have a written contract addressing this, whether they are in an employer/ employee relationship,or the implied nature of the collaboration. Depending on these factors, they may co-own the copyright, one of them may own it, or neither of them may own it (for example, ownership might be with their employer).
But, if no human is involved, there is nothing that may be copyrighted. This came up when a gorilla grabbed a camera and took a selfie. As I recall, it was deemed no human was involved so the picture was not copyrightable.
These are interesting questions. If you write instructions you have the copyright to them. A computer program is a set of instructions for the computer. So whoever wrote the program has the copyright, right?
But whoever performs those instructions should have the copyright to the "performance" I think. So in principle I could think that the computer performs the instructions and thus can have the copyright to the "performance" but not to the instructions.
I'm thinking about music, and "scores" written by composers, but performed by musicians.
There needs to be a minimum threshold of creativity for something to be copyrightable. It's a low amount of creativity, snapping a photo at a painting is even enough for copyright of the photo of the painting being recognized by the photographer, but there needs to be some creativity.
A computer isn't doing anything creative at all so shouldn't have any performance copyright. Calling a computer's work creative would be like claiming my pants are being creative when I put them on in the morning. It doesn't make much sense to me. The designer of the pants might have copyright, but the pants themselves do not.
> This came up when a gorilla grabbed a camera and took a selfie. As I recall, it was deemed no human was involved so the picture was not copyrightable.
No. Nothing was deemed because the photographer didn’t sue Wikimedia for copyright infringement. Had he done so, he very likely would have won, as setting up the conditions to ensure that the monkeys would take selfies with his camera is almost certainly sufficient human involvement.
He works have lost. The argument was over the past production in the photo.
Seeing the camera settings isn't though. Otherwise every photo that used auto settings would be owned by the camera company
> He works have lost. The argument was over the past production in the photo. Seeing the camera settings isn't though.
Are you saying that a photographer doesn't own the copyright on a photo he takes with a delay timer? How about a camera he sets up with a motion sensor?
> Otherwise every photo that used auto settings would be owned by the camera company
No, it's about the camera operator owning the copyright, not the camera company
I don't know if the camera operator set things up in such a way he can be said to have taken the gorilla selfie picture. Maybe he did or didn't. Maybe nobody knows since it hasn't gone to court and a judge hasn't made up new case law yet and the facts are unique.
I'm not clear on what happened, I mentioned it as an anecdote related to a general point about the law.
But we can say for sure if the camera owner had not set up the shot and a monkey just grabbed the camera from him and took a selfie, to the camera owner's surprise, the photo would not be copyrightable "The U.S. Copyright Office, since the dispute began, has specifically listed 'a photograph taken by a monkey' as an example of an item that cannot be copyrighted." (That also extends to artworks by elephants.) "
