Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
The photographer created the photo and held copyright to it, and then someone else came along and created a derivative work out of it. As a derivative work, the copyright is jointly owned - both the photographer and the ORLY-writer hold copyright over the resulting image and so the permission of both is needed for it to be copied (unless such an addition is too trivial to warrant a copyright in the first place, in which case the photographer's the sole copyright holder to Orly.jpg. I don't think this changes anything as far we're concerned, though).
The problem here is that the O RLY website was claiming copyright over their image and not acknowleding the original author - kind of like what Baidupedia are doing.
Sorry for intruding on the conversation, but I fail to see how that is relevant to anything. We know their claim is bogus. Surely they could just as well claim they were the King of the United States and that the image was beamed down by space aliens, and it would have just as much effect on what the _real_ copyright status of the image is.
Similarly, if someone downloads Wikipedia content from Baidupedia, that doesn't give him any more _or_ any less rights to it than if he had got it straight from us, regardless of what Baidu may claim.
So the question is: Do we, under fair use, have the right to distribute, without permission from the copyright holder, a (low-resolution, defaced) copy of the original owl photo in an article describing the (illegal) use of said photo on internet fora?