Fastfission wrote:
I don't think that's a very tough case, in the end -- does cropping a public domain image suddenly give you the right to claim that no one else is allowed to crop the same public domain image in the same way?
Copyright, unlike patents, does not protect ideas. If two people independently arrive with the same result they may both be entitled to a copyright when they have both been creative. These kind of issues most commonly arise in cases of copyright infringement of a melody in music. Except for very short material this kind of independent duplication is virtually impossible. It is a possibility in dictionaries where the merger principle also applies.
(re-sent) Ec