Rowan Collins wrote:
On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 11:03:15 -0700, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
One thing I noticed is that the article mentions images created by private companies and then bought for use by the government. It occurs to me that people might have been using FOIA as an endrun to avoid paying the companies for their images - find out that the government happens to be one of their customers, demand copies from the government under FOIA, and then use the images for free "because it's from the government".
Ah, but wouldn't this still breach the original company's copyright?
Seems so to me, but FOIA itself probably muddies the waters - makes it a matter of the "public interest" or whatever. If it's ABC doing the stealing, probably hard for a small imaging company to stop them. This could all just be bought-and-paid-for legislation too, rationality is just one of the many options in DC. :-)
In any case, it doesn't matter to WP, because we don't want anything to do with improperly-licensed images anyway.
Stan