On 5/21/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/21/06, Anthony DiPierro
<wikilegal(a)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.