the defendant’s photographs was the bottle itself, id. at 766, and an accurate portrayal of the unadorned bottle could not be copyrighted. Facts and ideas are the public’s domain and open to exploitation to ensure the progress of science and the useful arts. Only original expressions of those facts or ideas are copyrightable, leaving the plaintiff in the Skyy case with an admittedly "thin" copyright offering protection perhaps only from exact duplication by others. Id.; see also SHL Imaging, Inc., 117 F. Supp. 2d at 311 ("Practically, the plaintiffs [photos] are only protected from verbatim copying.").
The teaching of Skyy I and II, then, is that the vodka bottle, because it did not owe its origins to the photographers, had to be filtered out to determine what copyrightable expression remained. And, by analogy – though not perhaps the one Meshwerks had in mind – we hold that the unadorned images of Toyota's vehicles cannot be copyrighted by Meshwerks and likewise must be filtered out. To the extent that Meshwerks’ digital wire-frame models depict only those unadorned vehicles, having stripped away all lighting, angle, perspective, and "other ingredients" associated with an original expression, we conclude that they have left no copyrightable matter.[1]
- ↑ The Skyy I panel also faulted the district court for analyzing the photographs as “derivative works," requiring (a) non-trivial differences between the photos and bottle and (b) that copyright in the photo would not interfere with Skyy’s ability to use its own bottle. See Skyy I, 225 F.3d at 1073. A derivative work is based on a pre-existing copyrighted work and seeks to recast, transform, or adapt that original work. 17 U.S.C. § 101. Meshwerks argues that the
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