In a message dated 1/13/2009 2:03:24 PM Pacific Standard Time, saintonge@telus.net writes:
Legally, you are right. That doesn't stop groups like Corbis from doing it. It's very easy to add a copyright notice to anything, with or without justification. Who is going to be willing to challenge them? >>
---------- We're speaking past each other. I am not suggesting that a person, scanning some image, cannot add a copyright disclaimer to it.
What I'm suggesting is that *this action* does not make a public domain work into a private copyrighted work. What it does, what they are suggesting it does at any rate, is make THEIR OWN WORK into a private copyrighted work.
It does nothing at all to the original public domain piece, and no one, as far as I know, even the defendents/plaintiffs have suggested that it alters that the piece is still public domain. What they suggested is that *their own image* of that piece *solely* is a copyrighted piece. Not the original.
Hope that's more clear.
Will Johnson
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On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 6:41 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
We're speaking past each other. I am not suggesting that a person, scanning some image, cannot add a copyright disclaimer to it.
What I'm suggesting is that *this action* does not make a public domain work into a private copyrighted work. What it does, what they are suggesting it does at any rate, is make THEIR OWN WORK into a private copyrighted work.
It does nothing at all to the original public domain piece, and no one, as far as I know, even the defendents/plaintiffs have suggested that it alters that the piece is still public domain. What they suggested is that *their own image* of that piece *solely* is a copyrighted piece. Not the original.
Hope that's more clear.
Will Johnson
The entire point of me posting this was to point out that this was exactly what we were doing in practice. In the instance of the Einstein-Planck photo, we were using the fact that Corbis had claimed it as a reason to suspect it must be copyrighted. My point was that just because Corbis claims it, doesn't mean it is copyrighted.
You can't use whether Corbis claims something as evidence of its copyrighted status, if you have other reasons to suspect it is in the public domain. That's my point. Don't trust Corbis to be up front about copyrights. They aren't.
When we get to the point where we all start trusting Corbis, then Corbis has, _in effect_, taken something from the public domain.
I see lots of stuff I know to be public domain in news media in particular that credits it to Corbis, Getty, etc. This happens even in very obvious cases, like US military photos of atomic tests.
FF