Case 1:22-cv-01564-BAH Document 24 Filed 08/18/23 Page 8 of 15
the constitutionality of an amendment to the Copyright Act to cover photographs). In fact, that malleability is explicitly baked into the modern incarnation of the Copyright Act, which provides that copyright attaches to “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). Copyright is designed to adapt with the times. Underlying that adaptability, however, has been a consistent understanding that human creativity is the sine qua non at the core of copyrightability, even as that human creativity is channeled through new tools or into new media. In Sarony, for example, the Supreme Court reasoned that photographs amounted to copyrightable creations of “authors,” despite issuing from a mechanical device that merely reproduced an image of what is in front of the device, because the photographic result nonetheless “represent[ed]” the “original intellectual conceptions of the author.” Sarony, 111 U.S. at 59. A camera may generate only a “mechanical reproduction” of a scene, but does so only after the photographer develops a “mental conception” of the photograph, which is given its final form by that photographer’s decisions like “posing the [subject] in front of the camera, selecting and arranging the costume, draperies, and other various accessories in said photograph, arranging the subject so as to present graceful outlines, arranging and disposing the light and shade, suggesting and evoking the desired expression, and from such disposition, arrangement, or representation” crafting the overall image. Id. at 59–60. Human involvement in, and ultimate creative control over, the work at issue was key to the conclusion that the new type of work fell within the bounds of copyright.
Copyright has never stretched so far, however, as to protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand, as plaintiff urges here. Human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.
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