On 9/27/07, Monahon, Peter B. Peter.Monahon@uspto.gov wrote:
... Spectators can be blurred beyond recognition...with photoshop...make bystanders...look "incidentally out of focus" rather than "deliberately anonymized"...
...When using a good camera, the bigger the aperture (the smaller the f-number) the smaller the depth of focus. This also increases the amount of light hitting the film, meaning you can speed up the shutter speed...
Film? Hahahahah! And ... adjustable settings on little tiny digital cell phone camera chips and their little tiny lenses? Hahahahah!
"Good" is in the eye of the beholder, and on Wikipedia, the kind of images presented as fair use are barely 100 pixels in either dimension - about equal to 0.01 megapixels! ANY camera captures w-a-y more than that, and uploading ~100x pixel copies (even of other people's photos) as fair use reference images probably would pass muster in an encyclopedia. Does anyone know of any case law in this new field?
Yes, but we're discussing user-created/submitted Free images, so fair use restrictions are irrelevant. Also, we want Free images in as high resolution as possible, even if they're only displayed as 250px thumbnails on the web, for later use in printed volumes.