[kchamplewski]

Photographers don't automatically gain copyright of a photo by virtue of it being a photo - they gain copyright when they create what the law considers a copyrightable work.

In practice, most photos involve creating or capturing a scene in a unique or new way, and this adds something new sufficient to make the photograph a new work and hence subject to copyright.

The act of photographing a public domain painting in such a way that you just reproduce the painting and add nothing new, however, doesn't necessarily create a new work - it may instead count as a reproduction of that original work and hence subject to the original work's copyright, as no new copyrightable material is added.

There is a bit of a grey area in that if I say, arrange a whole bunch of public domain art in a particular way and photograph it, I could quite reasonably argue that my arrangement itself consists of a work and so my photographs are subject to copyright. Similarly if I parody or otherwise transform a public domain work, I can assert that my work is copyrightable as it is transformative. This 3D scan doesn't fall into this area however since the scan was clearly intended to reproduce the original work, as opposed to create a new copyrightable work.

[perl4ever]

As far as I know, 3d scanning is not a matter of just pushing a button on a device, whereas a photo can be, so the presumption ought to be that the former involves more creativity than the simplest example of the latter.

[nitrogen]

Tedious work and creativity are completely orthogonal.

[perl4ever]

I would say they are definitely not orthogonal. Things that aren't automated and aren't easy (and some that are easy) require choosing from a near-infinite number of alternatives in a way that can't be or hasn't been defined in a mechanistic way. If I claim that seems like a reasonable definition of creativity, what do you think is missing from it?

[andreareina]

It's a question of expression vs reproduction. A 3d scan copies the object being scanned, without interpretation or (intentional) embellishment. It's the same with photographs taken for documentation purposes. The skill required doesn't matter.

I used to be a photographer, and a tech at a high-end photo lab (e.g. we had a couple of Condé Nast magazines as clients). A lot of jobs incurred more work from the technically demanding end (high resolution scans, color matching) than the creative end.

It's not always clear-cut, there's usually going to be a bit of both sides. There's the whole idea of derived works, where the changes you've made are yours but the work as a whole is also entangled in the copyright of the original. But the more the new work is (meant to be) a faithful reproduction, the more it's "just" a copy and not a new riff. Again, it's about the intention and the difference in content between old and new, not so much about how much work or skill was required.

[perl4ever]

I'm not experienced in creating complex 3D models, but my passing acquaintance with such things (including trying to write a program to convert points to a mesh once) makes me think the claim there is no interpretation or more than one way to create a model of an object is absurd. This seems like an extreme example of assuming something you haven't done is trivial.

Another separate point, supposing for the sake of argument 3D models are not creative... It is well known that, say, a "white pages" style phone directory was ruled not to be copyrightable. But does that mean it is a copyright violation?

[andreareina]

It's not about how easy it is, or how many ways there are to do the thing. The point of a 3d scan is to reproduce the facts of the object being scanned: there's this surface at this position with this normal, another one there with these properties, etc. Choices to be made might trade accuracy for less cost (in time and/or money), but those choices don't change the fact that the scan's purpose and value rest in the facts being recorded. It's like the quake fast inverse square root vs the pedestrian n => 1/sqrt(n), the skill in writing fast inverse square root doesn't imbue the result of its evaluation with any of that.

WRT your second paragraph, I'm not sure I understand. How could there be a copyright violation on something that can't be copyrighted?