--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com wrote:
It would please me greatly to be able to respond that their claims are preposterous. Shall we research this carefully?
IANAL
Exact reproductions of public domain portraits are not creative works and thus not eligible for copyright protection in the U.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources has long said: |Accurate photographs of paintings lack expressive content and are |automatically in the public domain once the painting's copyright has expired |(which it has in the US if it was published before 1923). All other copyright | notices can safely be ignored.
Posts about this from Aug 2003 by Alex: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-August/006049.html http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-August/006019.html
Quote:
|See Bridgeman Art Library ltd. v. Corel Corp. SDNY (1999) 36 F. Supp. |2d 191. | |You can read the case here: |http://www.constitution.org/1ll/court/fed/bridgman.html |Copyright of photographs of works that are in the public domain are not |original enough to afford them protection under US copyright law, even when |such works might be protected in other countries that afford greater | protection than US law.
and
|The Bridgeman case was a British publisher; it is important to |remember the national treatment principle in international copyright law. |The regarguement in Bridgeman surrounded around the question of |applying British law to infringement under US law. It was put aside |because the British case on which Bridgeman relied was no longer |good law in the UK (it was an 1865 that said a photograph that was |just a copy of something else was copyrightable because at that |time it was not just "slavish copying" as it is now considered.
So I would say that their claim is bogus.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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