Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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This was settled years ago in the US by Bridgeman vs Corel (Corel could copy old photos for their library disc). Also see Meshworks vs Toyota (3D scan of real car is not a new work). It's all based on Feist vs Rural Telephone (telephone directories not works of authorship). Museums have been whining about this for years, but not winning in court. Wikimedia puts up images under those rules, and no one has ever successfully sued Wikimedia over that, although there's been some huffing and puffing.

Feist is why the US doesn't have database copyright, and that's a Supreme Court decision based on the copyright/patent clause in the Constitution. It's a very strong holding, in that says Congress can't enact laws to make copyright cover things that don't have human authorship. "The standard of originality is low, but it does exist."

Bridgeman Art Library (the company) has been arguing for years that UK law lets them own copyright of pictures of old masters. That's over.

This has implications for large language models.

Do you know if this ruling applies to word lists of the English language such as those used in tournament Scrabble?

I believe it was settled long ago that mere lists (e.g., telephone directories) with no creative content are not copyrightable in the United States. I'm not familiar with the Scrabble word lists, but if that's all they are I'd guess they'd fall under that ruling.

Dictionaries, on the other hand, are copyrightable because there's creative work involved in writing the definitions.

I feel like there would be a case to answer if it went to court in the UK, Scrabble words are not an entirely arbitrary selection, nor are they all words in [most] regular dictionaries AFAICT. The list has been curated in order to provide a specific set of rules for a game: there seems to be a creative act of compilation. To say it another way; it's a factual presentation - but the fact (of which words are in the list) was created for the game.

This makes it unlike an almanac, say, where the list is dictated by past events.

It's perhaps similar to the Guinness Book of Records, where the choice of records to present is creative (along with the usual creative aspects of a book, composition of pages, choice of accompanying images, etc.).

One consideration a court might take is that the list cannot be generated without copying from the established Scrabble Dictionary because one otherwise would not know whether to include or exclude any particular word. A list of 'all existing English words of 1-3 letters', say, would be fine though.

As loathe as I am to say anything nice about our copyright system or scrabble (a territory capturing game without the most obscure and silly rules for capturing space), it does seem like the sort of thing that ought to be covered.

That may have been true in the past, but the game is now over 75 years old. There is just absolutely zero chance that the inventors of the game would have been more motivated to invent if they were given a longer exclusive term. Since the stated goal of copyright is to advance the progress of the arts, there is no justifiable reason the public should continue granting exclusivity to the game at this point in time.

The game itself, sure.

The list, I’m not sure. I mean if someone is actively curating a tournament list, that seems like ongoing working that ought to be protectable somehow.

Then again, various sports maintain a tournament scene without protected rules, so I may be wrong about this.

If scrabble world lists are copyrightable then why wouldn't telephone directories be copyrightable?

The word lists are frequently updated to cover innovations in language. E.g. you'll be allowed to play VAX and ZONKEY starting in 2024.

I would think the transformativeness defense used by appropriation artists might be applicable to establish that a photo of an out-of-copyright image is an “original work of authorship.” Cue Richard Prince to put it to the test…

TFA explicitly addresses that was the question under consideration:

> In his ruling (THJ v Sheridan, 2023), Lord Justice Arnold wrote that, for copyright to arise: “What is required is that the author was able to express their creative abilities in the production of the work by making free and creative choices so as to stamp the work created with their personal touch”. Importantly, he went on: “This criterion is not satisfied where the content of the work is dictated by technical considerations, rules or other constraints which leave no room for creative freedom”. In other words, if the aim of a museum photograph is to accurately reproduce a painting (which it must be), then it cannot acquire copyright.

I.e. these museums were selling pictures of artworks that by definition needed to adhere to a true reproduction of the original as closely as possible. It wasn't a question of taking a picture of an out-of-copyright painting and applying some level of skill/artistic license to transform the original in some way.

If anyone is interested in copyright law I would recommend a free CopyrightX course from Harvard ( https://cyber.harvard.edu/teaching/copyrightx ). During the course you gain insight into the legislative side of copyright matters.

It is my understanding that in collage works and the like, the artist has copyright over their creative inputs to the resulting piece, but does not gain any rights over the bits they cobbled the final together from. If I understand it correctly, even if the museum created a fancy collage for the side of the building, yes they would own that arrangement, but not any of the paintings which went into it. They still couldn't stop you from sharing images of the original works therein.

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