Where is the onwiki discussion about this? I could find '[1]'
Or a wikipedia page that describes the copyright status of imagery of DSOs?
John Vandenberg. sent from Galaxy Note On Sep 15, 2012 1:25 PM, "とある白い猫" to.aru.shiroi.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I am not seeking legal advice. I am asking the pursuit of the issue. I am not a US citizen so I do not have a congress person to contact. The laws governing copyright can be amended to address the issue of deep space objects (DSO). I do not expect a result next week, I merely want the issue to enter into an agenda of some sort. If the Foundation is going to take the lead, this probably would only be possible through a board decision. In such a case I want to work with people to come up with such a draft proposal to the board.
I realize this is an unusual request but there seems to be a lack of clarity on this issue[1]. Argument is that copyright can be an issue since not every organization observing or assisting NASA's observations are PD-USgov compatible. We may be forced to permanently delete all deep space objects as a result.
I'd like to provide a short technical explanation why copyright of deep space objects or DSOs (objects outside of the solar system) are meaningless. For ordinary photographs copyright is determined by factors such as lighting, perspective, exposure and other such settings that creates a different image of the same object. You can distinguish the difference between a daylight photo and an evening photo.
With deep space objects however, even the stellar parallax[2] has a very small value. The closest object outside of the solar system is 4.24 light years (268,136 AU's) away. The semi-major axis of earth is about 1AUs. The difference in perspective is like looking at a 2cm (width of a nickel) wide object 5.3km (3.29 miles) away and the perspective difference is switching left eye to the right eye. We lack scientific instruments to even detect a stellar parallax for objects much further. In other words our perspective of the nearest star and beyond is more or less constant and the objects themselves look the same for hundreds of years.
So any photo of a deep space object I or someone else takes from the solar system will look identical regardless of when and where on earth I take it within multiple lifetimes. I think this can bring legal precedent for us to either disregard any copyright claim or at least pursue lawmakers in congress to amend the copyright law to make an exception in the law. People who worked with congress such as Neil Degrasse Tyson could be consulted to this end. Also international treaties[3] can be consulted to this end as copyrighting photos of deep space objects could be interpreted as an unfair exploitation of resources.
I realize this reads like something out of Star Trek but this is growing to be quite a problem as we see more and more weird copyright claims even when dealing with NASA which traditionally had a PD-USgov mentality. NASA regularly contracts its more recent projects and to be fair we do not know how NASA contracts these projects which could potentially lead to legitimate copyright claims in the future.
[1]:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Potential_deletion_of...
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