[Commons-l] Are models works or arts ?

[Rama Rama]

Hello,

a while ago, I was in Paris to photograph the Naval Museum. They have
models of ships which can be either
* ancient arsenal models (at the time a scale model was considered to
be part of the documentation of a ship, along with the plans), but
also
* modern models of modern ships, and even, more treacherously,
* modern models of ancient ships

I'd like to have an educated opinion on what constitutes a work of art
in this domain. We have quite a few photographs of recent scale models
like
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Croiseur-Colbert-p1000458.jpg
or
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LNG_tanker_model.jpg

Some of the recent models are credited to their authors as if they
were sculptures, so there might be a strong case to consider them as
original, copyrighted works of art whose photographs cannot be
photographed freely.

I have quite a few such images in my pipeline, I'd be glad to know
what to do with them.

  -- Rama