Intermediate copying

Hello all. Here's a hypo and a question:

Art department takes photographs of ordinary household items from catalogs, and scans them digitally, then using Photoshop manipulates the image to create an entirely new image.

While it's clear to me that if it were a matter of straight reproduction of the original, there's infringement at least as far as the arrangement, i.e., the positioning of napkins and forks and glasses, etc. That much, at least with minimal creativity, is protected.

But isn't the orginal scanning itself an infringement? Using a photo to create an entirely "different" work is infringment under cases like Rogers v. Koons. But there, the creative expression of the original was more or less intact, albeit now in sculpted form. In my hypo, it no longer exists.

Any comments or cases come to mind?

Thanks all,
Charles Glasser
NYU 3L
<cjg6159[_at_]is.nyu.edu> Received on Fri Apr 12 1996 - 04:22:14 GMT