[License-discuss] [License-review] The Right of Display

[John Cowan]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 5:50 PM Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:

Two problems in that sentence: First, the artwork is not "resulting." The
> code doesn't create the artwork, it merely facilitates the display of the
> artwork.
>

I don't understand that to be "computer-generated art" in the relevant
sense.


> A Picasso painting is not created in any sense by my browser just because
> Google displays it to me. When I watch a presentation on YouTube, my
> browser isn't creating anything relating to the "literary work" that is the
> presentation.
>

No, indeed.  But suppose I write and send you a program that, when used as
a web server, transmits the necessary HTML+CSS to display on a standard
browser a pattern of highly colored blobs that I consider artistic, such
that if I painted this same pattern of blobs it would clearly be
copyrightable.  If the license on the server code says "You can run this on
your own computer and look at the output all you want", then surely you are
not entitled to make the server available to all on the Internet, because
you have infringed my public performance right, which I did not grant you.

> The Copyright Office considers the code that creates it and the screen
> display that is created by the code the same work and courts have adopted
> that position.
>

In such a case as I outline above, I think the Office's position is the
only reasonable one: the code and the resulting display when the code runs
are one work because the transformation from one to another is mechanical.
This is analogous to a binary file and its corresponding source file being
one work. Though probably they have mostly dealt with works that affect the
computer's local monitor, in which case public performance is putting the
monitor in your display window.


 John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Verbogeny is one of the pleasurettes of a creatific thinkerizer.
        --Peter da Silva
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