2009/1/16 WJhonson@aol.com:
"Point to" versus "take". Two separate things. I'm not disputing the right to link to an image on bible.org. I'm disputing the right to take that image and post it to flicker.com
And "what if there is no museum image" only means that we are in the same position as "what if we have no free image of Britney Spears eating a hot dog for our hot dog page??". I.E. we're not worse off than we've been for five thousand years.
The mere fact that an image now exists, doesn't mean we get the right to do whatever we want with it.
Under common law we have the right to do anything that is not illegal.
And the mere fact that no image exists, doesn't mean we get the right to do whatever it takes to get one.
We have the right to anything legal to get one.
We still are ethically bound to follow standard protocol, and not rock the image boat.
Not under any of the commonly held systems of ethics within liberal democracies.
If we adhere to the idea that any scan of a PD item is a voluntary act to freely distribute such scan to the world for any purpose than the end result is that the massive scanners will simply stop scanning and we won't have anything free, limited, for pay, or what.
We will deal with that if it happens. For various reasons I strongly suspect it won't.