Month: April 2012

It’s seeping into our lives through burgeoning phone and tablet computer apps, in products targeted to help those with physical challenges, via videogames and, yes, of course, in some movies, notably  porn productions. Unlike some other computer-based technologies, however, “augmented reality” or AR combines the virtual atop a real base (as visualized, left, in the Raygun Studio illustration), and, thus, may present some new and intriguing copyright infringment issues. Does the underlying creative material, which must copied and stored in the AR software  before augmentation, fall into the “derivative work” copyright category, meaning it generally requires a license to the original work before creative work may be done on it (unless the original work permissibly may be used because it is in public domain or the user enjoys a fair-use defense)? Copyright law, it appears, will play a big role in AR, as it does in other media, where the author of creative content licenses others to reproduce, distribute, alter, publicly display or publicly perform that content. AR users, however, hope to expand their technology even further into the commercial world by taking everyday images and and turning them into informative, interactive pieces, layering them with video, graphics and other content or information. While there are few case precedents for this technology now,  Sherwood 48 Associates v. Sony Corp of America, a 2002 case, offers some insight. The court in...