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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 9154668" data-attributes="member: 6669048">Because intellectual property law is complicated. Anything created by algorithmic generation cannot be protected under United States copyright law. However, that would only refer to the individual assets that are algorithmically generated.The case last year involved someone attempting to copyright a comic book created through algorithmic generation. The comic book itself can still be protected under copyright because there was human creative input put into it - deciding which images to use in what format and aspect ratios in what layout on the page along with human-written text. The individual images, however, could not be copyrighted because they were algorithmically generated.For another example, I can create a comic book using public domain images and own the copyright on that comic book. I can go through archives of 17th, 18th, and 19th century art and use it to make comics and I would own the copyright on that comic in its entirety as a comic while the images themselves would remain in the public domain.To extrapolate into game design, if I make a roleplaying game where you play characters from the Wild West and I use real photographs of Bill Hickcock, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, etc. as the character portraits, I don't own the rights to those photographs even though I still own the copyright on the game itself. If I made a board game about stealing famous artwork with cards printed with different works of art, I don't own the Mona Lisa or Starry Night, but I do own the game as a whole. Someone else could come and make their own art heist game or wild west RPG using the exact same images, but they couldn't make the exact same game*.For some game designers, that's fine. They're likely to use creative commons, public domain, stock art, or artwork without an exclusive license anyway because doing work-for-hire or exclusive licensed commissions for art is far more expensive than the other options. And many game designers and publishers do exactly that. So they wouldn't care from a copyright standpoint whether the algorithmically generated art can be copyrighted or not since they wouldn't own the copyright or any artwork they used.However, and I'm going to put this in bold for emphasis because it's something that often gets lost in these sort of discussions: "Legal" is not the same as "Ethical". There are many, many, many things that are perfectly legal to do that are terribly immoral and unethical. Just as there are many moral and ethical actions that are technically against the law. Discussions of the legality of an action and discussions of the morality of an action are two separate discussions. Even if an act is perfectly legal to do, someone who does that action can still be a complete jerk for doing it.For example, take someone listening to music on their phone without headphones. That is perfectly legal to do, but they're still a jerk. If someone yanks the phone out of their hands, puts it on mute, and throws it back to them that is not legal but to most people would be a morally correct action.* Not getting into the whole "you can't copyright game rules" thing because that's an entirely different complicated IP law discussion...</blockquote>

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