On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 6:41 PM, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:
We're speaking past each other.
I am not suggesting that a person, scanning some image, cannot add a
copyright disclaimer to it.
What I'm suggesting is that *this action* does not make a public domain
work
into a private copyrighted work. What it does, what they are suggesting
it
does at any rate, is make THEIR OWN WORK into a private copyrighted work.
It does nothing at all to the original public domain piece, and no one, as
far as I know, even the defendents/plaintiffs have suggested that it alters
that the piece is still public domain. What they suggested is that *their
own
image* of that piece *solely* is a copyrighted piece. Not the original.
Hope that's more clear.
Will Johnson
The entire point of me posting this was to point out that this was exactly
what we were doing in practice. In the instance of the Einstein-Planck
photo, we were using the fact that Corbis had claimed it as a reason to
suspect it must be copyrighted. My point was that just because Corbis claims
it, doesn't mean it is copyrighted.
You can't use whether Corbis claims something as evidence of its copyrighted
status, if you have other reasons to suspect it is in the public domain.
That's my point. Don't trust Corbis to be up front about copyrights. They
aren't.
When we get to the point where we all start trusting Corbis, then Corbis
has, _in effect_, taken something from the public domain.
I see lots of stuff I know to be public domain in news media in particular
that credits it to Corbis, Getty, etc. This happens even in very obvious
cases, like US military photos of atomic tests.
FF