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 backgrounds, lighting, angles, and colors – were all matters left to those (G&W, Saatchi, and 3D Recon) who came after Meshwerks left the scene. See infra Section II.C. Meshwerks thus played a narrow, if pivotal, role in the process by simply, if effectively, copying Toyota’s vehicles into a digital medium so they could be expressively manipulated by others.

Were we to afford copyright protection in this case, we would run aground on one of the bedrock principles of copyright law – namely, that originality, "as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works)." Feist, 499 U.S. at 345 (emphasis added). Because our copyright laws protect only "original" expression, the reason for refusing copyright protection to copies is clear, "since obviously a copier is not a creator, much less an 'independent' creator." Patry on Copyright § 3:28; see also id. ("The key is whether original matter in which protection is claimed is the result of plaintiff’s ingenuity rather than appropriation of another’s material."). As it happens, many other courts before us have denied copyright protection in analogous cases, involving copies of facts in the world, as well as copies of prior works of art. So, for example, in Sparaco v. Lawler, Matusky, Skelly, Engineers LLP, 303 F.3d 460, 467 (2d Cir. 2002), our sister circuit, relying on Feist, denied copyright protection to that portion of an architectural