Mak wrote:
<snip>
This has come up in an article I'm working on- does this ruling apply to images from books or manuscripts? Are books three dimensional art works, even if what you're reproducing is a single page from them? My father, a librarian, seems to think the owning library continues to hold copyright
for
all such images. I'm not so sure.
Photocopying a page of a book is a slavish copy... but you can make a good case that photography of any book as an archival process, or with the intent of producing high-quality images, is a sufficiently difficult process that it passes the minimum-creativity standard.
I don't know what the caselaw is on it, but I would be wary of an overbroad reliance on Bridgeman.
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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The specific image I'm thinking of is my own scan of a really crummy black-and-white microfilm, not an art-book/good facsimile level reproduction. I can see how in some cases such work would conceivably be copyrightable, but not how any image made from a book which is itself out of copyright would be copyrightable by the owning institution.
In the US if the book is in the public domain so are the pictures in it. This would follow logically if the duration of copyright is based on when the book was published. Where the duration is life plus some number of years, one needs to consider the possibility that the photographer may have died later than the person who owned the copyright on the book.
The Bridgeman case is based on US law. The UK, where Andrew is from, has a much less clear situation, or so the museums holding large collections of paintings would have you believe. Physical ownership of an object does not determine copyright.
Ec