Fastfission wrote:
Well, the case you are thinking of is surely Bridgeman v. Corel. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_v._Corel) or something that affirms it (like the recent Meshwerks v. Toyota). I understand that at the moment Wikipedia has a rather complicated determination of whether they use it or not.
Most of the legal question revolves around whether there is a lot of creativity in doing a reproduction. There are arguments on either side of things. Still, I think in the case of Corbis, the fact that at most they are just putting a photo onto a flat-bed scanner, maybe applying "auto-contrast" to the results (or doing some other sort of color syncing), ought to preclude the idea that they are doing anything "creative" in such cases.
(One thing that has long annoyed me in the discussions about Bridgeman is that the question is always posed as whether or not the adjustments were creative enough to generate a new copyright. In my mind this ignores the question of whether they are creative enough to generate a new copyright _and thus give the modifier monopoly control over the previous public domain material_. Moving things from the public to the private domain is a dangerous game and should only be reserved for truly substantial and worthwhile efforts to rehabilitate something that would otherwise be fairly useless -- massive restorations of crumbling things that require an amount of artistry on par with that which created the restored object in question -- and not just tweaking the reds and greens a bit, removing a scratch here or there with the clone tool. In my opinion. But I am neither a lawyer nor a judge.)
The law in this regard has more to do with whether the work is "original" rather than "creative". The distinction may seem somewhat hair-splitting, but that's what law suits are about.
Ec