On 1/23/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
I don't know that it has to be "basic
facts", but certainly when we're
talking about images in an encyclopedia we're talking about
communicating facts.
Well, that was just an example. But I am talking about things like
scientific facts, which are not copyrightable. If I use someone's
drawing of an atom to make my own drawing of an atom, that's fine,
even more so if I make my own graphical choices about it in the
process. What's copyrighted is the specific presentation, and whatever
"creative" decisions went into it, not the underlying "factual"
information.
Mickey Mouse is not quite the same thing as this, I don't think. Here
the underlying information is a fictional creation, based entirely on
someone's creativity. Hence it is copyrightable "all the way down", as
I understand it.
If a picture really is worth a thousand words, and
that's probably not
a bad order of magnitude for the purposes of this statement, then it'd
take about as much work to make a "copyright-safe" version of the same
"size" text or image, at least given the same level of communication
skills in each medium. Maybe that isn't fair, though, as most people
communicate more effectively with words than with pictures.
Again, copyright affects media differently and I think assuming that
it shouldn't is entirely wrong. It is very easy to make a "copyright
safe" paragraph about World War II based on a secondary source (take
the basic information, rewrite it in your own words, cite the original
source as a reference). It is not easy if even possible to make a
"copyright safe" version of a photograph of World War II.
Doesn't a [[clean room design]] allow you to make
"free" versions of
copyrighted things? If a textual description of a photograph is
non-infringing, and you give that textual description to a sketch
artist (who's never seen the original), then isn't the sketch likewise
non-infringing?
The [[clean room design]] is another example of copyright affecting
different media differently. Programming code is more like text than
it is like an image -- if I find another way to do the same thing you
do, without copying your code, I don't infringe on the copyright.
(Software _patents_ are a different matter entirely, of course, which
is why they are so controversial.)
But about your specific hypothetical: what is copyrighted in a picture
of Mickey Mouse is the creative aspect of it, not the specific lines
and whatnot. If you strive to copy that , no matter what machinations
you add in the execution is going to be ruled infringement. Again, if
the opposite were true then you'd see tons and tons of knockoffs of
every copyrighted image on the market.
FF