On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 5:50 PM Lawrence Rosen <[email protected]> wrote:
Two problems in that sentence: First, the artwork is not "resulting." The > code doesn't create the artwork, it merely facilitates the display of the > artwork. > I don't understand that to be "computer-generated art" in the relevant sense. > A Picasso painting is not created in any sense by my browser just because > Google displays it to me. When I watch a presentation on YouTube, my > browser isn't creating anything relating to the "literary work" that is the > presentation. > No, indeed. But suppose I write and send you a program that, when used as a web server, transmits the necessary HTML+CSS to display on a standard browser a pattern of highly colored blobs that I consider artistic, such that if I painted this same pattern of blobs it would clearly be copyrightable. If the license on the server code says "You can run this on your own computer and look at the output all you want", then surely you are not entitled to make the server available to all on the Internet, because you have infringed my public performance right, which I did not grant you. > The Copyright Office considers the code that creates it and the screen > display that is created by the code the same work and courts have adopted > that position. > In such a case as I outline above, I think the Office's position is the only reasonable one: the code and the resulting display when the code runs are one work because the transformation from one to another is mechanical. This is analogous to a binary file and its corresponding source file being one work. Though probably they have mostly dealt with works that affect the computer's local monitor, in which case public performance is putting the monitor in your display window. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan [email protected] Verbogeny is one of the pleasurettes of a creatific thinkerizer. --Peter da Silva
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