"Brian" Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote in message news:9839a05c0907181130y31750611u1d6c29c9e36842c9@mail.gmail.com...
A daguerreotype of a well adjusted [[Phineas Gage]] holding the rod that impaled his frontal lobes was recently discovered. It will be published in The Journal of the History of the Neurosciences imminently. It was, in my opinion, correctly uploaded to Commons under the Public Domain. It is, after all, an uncreative photograph of a daguerreotype made in the 1850s by an unknown photographer.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phineas_Gage.jpg
That said, have a look at the copyright text of the image claimed by the gallery that took the photo.
http://brightbytes.com/phineasgage/index.html
**NOTE* We are not claiming copyright to the work of an anonymous 1850s photographer but to the photograph we made of this object in our possession. Since you can't upload a daguerreotype to the internet and no one else could possibly have photographed this object for over 30 years, the only photographs available are the ones we have made.*
*For several years we have had an informal business supplying images in our collection http://brightbytes.com/past_tense/index.html to publishers, film, and television producers. We often grant permission for educational and non-profit usage.*
*High resolution photographs without a watermark are available for reproduction. Contact us for information on usage fees.*
*My reading of this is that they claim copyright of the image and that they often allow educational and non-profit institutions to use versions of the images that contain watermarks.
I am reading it like this: "We will provide higher quality without watermarks. If you want to spend the time or trouble procuring them for yourself and explaining why even copies on another medium are also in the public domain, then you will probably get away with it, but we will not make it easy for you to hide your source, and we might even raise legal difficulties for you, somewhere." (like here) In short, I would not worry about the watermarks, unless I was familiar with how uniform copyright law is in this world. Consider that we could hide millions of such images in the space of one glass container, so their costs in storage space for all these years is several orders of magnitude greater than ours. In short, I would not waste time hiding the courtesy.