It's not copyrightable automatically, you have to argue that you did have an artistic input (e.g. composition). Typically nobody bothers to argue against copyrightability of a photo, but there's been a few cases.
Do you know of any sources that talk about this? I tried to do a bit of searching and the closest I found was the .gov site [0] that did make a similar-ish claim, but was vague enough (at least to me, a non-lawyer), that it doesn't seem to rule out that every photo taken by an individual is copywriteable
>First, copyright protects original works of authorship, including original photographs. A work is original if it is independently created and is sufficiently creative. Creativity in photography can be found in a variety of ways and reflect the photographer’s artistic choices like the angle and position of subject(s) in the photograph, lighting, and timing.
I find it hard to imagine a photo taken by someone where it couldn't be argued that those elements exist. I guess the photographer would have to explicitly tell the court something like "no, I put no thought into it whatsoever, the camera was hanging off my bag and the shutter button was pressed accidentally". Like, if a human purposefully took a photo, then they have made choices about location, subject, etc. which have some element of "creativity" to them.
It's a simple and quite recent Dutch case (feel free to use AI to translate it :p), where the courts basically said that the plaintiff did not sufficiently motivate why their photo would be copyrighted, especially in light of very similar photos having been made by other people (4.5).
>First, copyright protects original works of authorship, including original photographs. A work is original if it is independently created and is sufficiently creative. Creativity in photography can be found in a variety of ways and reflect the photographer’s artistic choices like the angle and position of subject(s) in the photograph, lighting, and timing.
I find it hard to imagine a photo taken by someone where it couldn't be argued that those elements exist. I guess the photographer would have to explicitly tell the court something like "no, I put no thought into it whatsoever, the camera was hanging off my bag and the shutter button was pressed accidentally". Like, if a human purposefully took a photo, then they have made choices about location, subject, etc. which have some element of "creativity" to them.
[0] https://www.copyright.gov/engage/photographers/