[dllthomas]

Photography is a creative work, mechanically produced by manual selection of particular views of something you did not necessarily create. This doesn't seem a tremendously far cry - in a sense, he is taking photographs of maze-space.

[ars]

The result of a surveillance camera is not copyrightable. Only if a person controlled the camera. Even if the person carefully selected a site but then just left it there to record whatever would come, it's not clear that would be copyrightable.

If you fed in specific tuning parameters to the procedure and fine tuned them until you liked the output that might have a claim. But if you just let it work randomly and picked the ones you liked best that would not.

It's not enough to simply like the result, you have to actually do something to create that specific result.

[dllthomas]

How is "if a person controlled the camera" terribly semantically different from "picked the ones you liked best".

"Even if the person carefully selected a site but then just left it there to record whatever would come, it's not clear that would be copyrightable."

But in this case he selected a site (wrote the code), recorded a pile of footage, and then went through and selected particular shots based on his own personal criteria.

[ars]

He has a compilation copyright, but not copyright on the individual images.

If you leave a camera in public for a few days, then come back and edit the result into a movie you have copyright for the movie, but not for the individual stills that make it up.

To have copyright on the stills (rather than the compilation) you have to have some creativity into making them, not merely selecting them.

[dllthomas]

How does this differ from taking a shot with a tripod?

[ars]

You timed the shot. Don't confuse photo with video.

[dllthomas]

How is timing not selection? And it's still being captured mechanically.

Notice also that many cameras these days will take many shots in rapid succession (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burst_mode_%28photography%29)