Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
For the record I think the idea that the British Library can copyright this image to be evil. There are lots of pictures of old artworks at their website which I'd love to plunder. But it would be nice to establish the legal status of doing so under British law.
And that's right, there's a nasty little Copyright tag there at the bottom of the page. They also have a copyright statement in English:
http://www.kb.dk/elib/ophavsret/index-en.htm
As for Danish copyright laws it seems from my non-lawyer reading that they "protect" any photograph, regardless of creativity. I hope this sort of non-sense wouldn't hold up in a Danish court but I really don't know if it would.
Many of these things cannot be settled without going to court in each separate country, and the putative copyright holders know that the mere idea of landing in court can be a deterrent even when the chance of the court upholding the copyright is negligible.
Lego is a good example of a Danish company that actively pursues intellectual property rights against Megablocks in one country after another, and consistently loses.
Ec