On 5/21/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/21/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Is there case law suggesting that photographs of costumes or action figures are copyright infringement?
That's a valid question. One could argue that photographing a doll removes the expression from commercial relevance to the copyright holder. If that is true, then I would suspect photos of dolls (not 3D models) work particularly well for cartoon characters, while artist's impressions are better for human actors. Is there such a thing as "clearly derivative, but not infringing"?
Actually, this brings up a common misnomer about US copyright law, which is probably in part spread because of the strange terms of the GPL. Whether or not something is a "derivative" is irrelevant to the particular situation. Copyright law protects *preparation* of a derivative work and *copying* of a copyrighted work, it doesn't *directly* protect copying of a derivative work. Copying of a derivative work is infringement only because (or maybe I should say to the extent) it involves copying of the original work (see Mirage Editions v. Albuquerque A.R.T. and Galoob v. Nintendo).
The situation is complicated by our assertion that the image is free content, allowing you to use it for any purpose whatsoever. Of course it's always possible to effectively turn a free content picture into a copyright infringement through modification. I really don't have a clue where to draw the line at the moment.
We live in a copyrighted world. It gets quite nauseating sometimes.
Erik
The combination of copyright, international law, and free content is a very tricky one. This is one of the things I hope can be hashed out to some extent during the Free Content Definition procedure.