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Comment by dls2016 | Hacker News Reader

dls2016

There are thousands of tools out there for automating tedious parts of animation or drawing or video editing or audio production…

Where is the complexity?

For instance ReCycle was a tool written in the 90s for chopping up a sampled beat (waveform) to allow easy re-arranging. (Now the company makes Reason.)

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I'll oversimplify video production to make the point, but let's say I'm making a video where a Bob runs up to Alice, makes a snide comment, Alice makes a clever comeback, and Bob slinks away in shame. There are a few creative parts to this:

1) Writing the script.

2) Designing the visual look of Bob and Alice.

3) Designing the animation (e.g. animating the body language of "slinking").

Those are all creative contributions. A tool like this one converts an image into bones, which I don't think has a creative element. It also has a bunch of pre-baked animations of those bones, which are neat, and do have a creative element.

Is that enough? I don't know.

Let's take this to an extreme. In the early '00s, there was a popular video (an early meme) of a pair of stick figures having a rather fancy fight. Most of the work was in the rather comedic body language. If I replaced those stick figures with something my child drew, it'd still be /mostly/ the original work. Simply replacing a stick figure with a child's drawing doesn't change the underlying work. Even if I took a little clip, say a neat-looking jump turning kick, I couldn't take that without permission.

There's a line somewhere in there, and I'm not quite sure where it is. I don't think anyone really knows until there's case law.

And, to me, creating bones of a character seems a lot like extracting individual hits of a beat. Both allow you to easily re-arrange the original creation. (Let's assume that you own the copyright to the underlying recording in the ReCycle situation, so as to avoid a discussion of the legal implications of sampling music.)

I'm sure if I dug into a professional animation application, I could find a dozen more analogous tools.

I don't see where the legal complexity is. Not that I'm a lawyer, but I can't think of a single case where a tool to automate artistic tedium resulted in some transfer of copyright.

> And, to me, creating bones of a character seems a lot like extracting individual hits of a beat.

I agree.

> (Let's assume that you own the copyright to the underlying recording in the ReCycle situation, so as to avoid a discussion of the legal implications of sampling music.)

And this assumption isn't valid, and it's precisely where the complexity comes in. The tool doesn't just create bones. It has a bunch of rather nice gaits which presumably a human artist designed to be nice to look at:

- 8 dancing movements

- 8 funny movements

- 7 jumping movements

- 9 walking movements

I think those are analogous to the samples you're using in your example. If the sample is a generic recording of a piano, that's one thing. If it's Justin Bieber saying "Stay," that's another thing.

Good point, which I didn't appreciate. But I'd argue the pre-programmed gaits are more analogous to "presets" and not samples. To be honest I don't if use of presets falls under the same copyright rules as use of samples.

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