I have an actual situation as follows. Someone has taken an old map (long out of copyright), scanned it onto their computer, and now claims to hold copyright on the scan.
It seems to me this is a bluff. A computer scan should not be any different from a photocopy. There is no artistic input to the result, and in this case the scanner even advertises that the computer file is a precise reproduction of the original.
Am I wrong?
Thanks, Zero.
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On 17/11/06, zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com wrote:
I have an actual situation as follows. Someone has taken an old map (long out of copyright), scanned it onto their computer, and now claims to hold copyright on the scan.
It seems to me this is a bluff. A computer scan should not be any different from a photocopy. There is no artistic input to the result, and in this case the scanner even advertises that the computer file is a precise reproduction of the original.
Am I wrong?
Thanks, Zero.
As long as this someone hasn't manipulated the scanned copy of the map, you are right.
Zero wrote:
I have an actual situation as follows. Someone has taken an old map (long out of copyright), scanned it onto their computer, and now claims to hold copyright on the scan.
Big media companies do this all the time. For example, if you go to a bookstore and buy a recent printing of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I think you'll find that the publisher has claimed copyright on *their copy* of Tenniel's illustrations and/or Carroll's text. (Dover, at least, is a happy exception.)
There is no artistic input to the result, and in this case the scanner even advertises that the computer file is a precise reproduction of the original.
There may be no artistic input, but some will claim that they deserve protection for all the work they did tracking down the old map and making the scan. To be lily-white, it can be argued that you're supposed to track down an original copy of the old map yourself, and make your own scan.
(On the other hand, if the computer file truly is a precise reproduction of the original, you can convince yourself that using it is fine, since the alleged copyright holder can't prove you're using their scan.)
This situation gets particularly interesting in the case of famous art. Most museums disallow cameras; casual visitors are not allowed to photograph or otherwise make copies of the artwork within, even though it's long out of copyright. If you're a publisher and you want to make a copy for an art book you're printing, you have to pay the museum a -- sometimes hefty -- licensing fee. Having paid this fee, you're not going to let people freeload on you, so you're going to slap your own copyright on your art book. And the museum will back you up on this: they make money on those licensing fees; in fact part of their licensed-copy agreement is often (I think) a requirement that the licensed copies disallow reproduction.
The upshot is that if copies are copyrightable, it can be effectively impossible to obtain your own free copy of a public domain work, if the original is inaccessible.
I am not a copyright lawyer and I don't know if the practices I've described are defensible from a copyright law point of view. (*I'm* certainly not defending them.) But I get the impression that they do happen all the time. In other words, the claim that someone "deserves protection for all the work they did (or the fees they paid) tracking down the old map and making the scan" is apparently accepted in practice.
On 11/17/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Big media companies do this all the time. For example, if you go to a bookstore and buy a recent printing of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I think you'll find that the publisher has claimed copyright on *their copy* of Tenniel's illustrations and/or Carroll's text. (Dover, at least, is a happy exception.)
Under UK law they could claim copyright on the typesetting for 20 years. I don't know what the law in the US is about this though.
(On the other hand, if the computer file truly is a precise reproduction of the original, you can convince yourself that using it is fine, since the alleged copyright holder can't prove you're using their scan.)
This situation gets particularly interesting in the case of famous art. Most museums disallow cameras; casual visitors are not allowed to photograph or otherwise make copies of the artwork within, even though it's long out of copyright. If you're a publisher and you want to make a copy for an art book you're printing, you have to pay the museum a -- sometimes hefty -- licensing fee. Having paid this fee, you're not going to let people freeload on you, so you're going to slap your own copyright on your art book. And the museum will back you up on this: they make money on those licensing fees; in fact part of their licensed-copy agreement is often (I think) a requirement that the licensed copies disallow reproduction.
In the museums will not back you up if you take it to court. The last thing they want is a Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp type case taken taken to a higher level which would remove any remaining grey area.
The upshot is that if copies are copyrightable, it can be effectively impossible to obtain your own free copy of a public domain work, if the original is inaccessible.
that would depend on the ethical system you are opperating under.
I am not a copyright lawyer and I don't know if the practices I've described are defensible from a copyright law point of view. (*I'm* certainly not defending them.) But I get the impression that they do happen all the time. In other words, the claim that someone "deserves protection for all the work they did (or the fees they paid) tracking down the old map and making the scan" is apparently accepted in practice.
Not really. What is accepted is that you are free to try and claim copyright on PD material.
geni wrote:
On 11/17/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
The upshot is that if copies are copyrightable, it can be effectively impossible to obtain your own free copy of a public domain work, if the original is inaccessible.
that would depend on the ethical system you are opperating under.
But of course. That's why I said "if" and "can be", not "since" and "is".
On 11/17/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I am not a copyright lawyer and I don't know if the practices I've described are defensible from a copyright law point of view. (*I'm* certainly not defending them.) But I get the impression that they do happen all the time. In other words, the claim that someone "deserves protection for all the work they did (or the fees they paid) tracking down the old map and making the scan" is apparently accepted in practice.
Not really. What is accepted is that you are free to try and claim copyright on PD material.
You are not "free to try and claim" so much as "it is very rare that people ever get taken to court for false copyright claims over PD material, even though it is illegal."
CORBIS does the same thing, by the way -- they have a huge number of PD images in their photo collections which are labeled as (c) CORBIS. I think it is ethically indefensible -- one can want to protect ones labors how one wants but copyright is supposed to protect creativity, and scanning something -- no matter how hard it was to find or track down -- requires no creativity. There are other ways to protect content and labors other than false claims of copyright (esp. in a culture which is hypersensitive about copyright in days of late). It is a gross abuse of the ignorance of most people about copyright law.
FF
On 11/19/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
You are not "free to try and claim" so much as "it is very rare that people ever get taken to court for false copyright claims over PD material, even though it is illegal."
How is it illegal?
CORBIS does the same thing, by the way -- they have a huge number of PD images in their photo collections which are labeled as (c) CORBIS. I think it is ethically indefensible -- one can want to protect ones labors how one wants but copyright is supposed to protect creativity, and scanning something -- no matter how hard it was to find or track down -- requires no creativity.
That would be the result of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.
However there are complications. Take this for example:
[[Image:Bridgewater map 1946.jpg]]
First the scan was made in the UK so slightly different laws apply. Secondly the scan is not perfect you will note that some lines that should be striaght were bent. Still up to this stage your no creativity holds since the only changes were due to my being in a hurry and doing a rather poor job. However it doesn't stop there. The image was cropped. Is that non creative? Then User:Steinsky takes the scan and cleans it up and shapens it a bit. is that non creative? remeber it is likely that User:Steinsky has never seen the original so they are probably not trying to recreate it.
There are other ways to protect content and labors other than false claims of copyright (esp. in a culture which is hypersensitive about copyright in days of late). It is a gross abuse of the ignorance of most people about copyright law.
FF
"ignorance of the law is no excuse" There are many problems caused by poor understanding of IP law this is just one of them.
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geni stated for the record:
On 11/19/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
You are not "free to try and claim" so much as "it is very rare that people ever get taken to court for false copyright claims over PD material, even though it is illegal."
How is it illegal?
Fraud.
- -- Sean Barrett | You'll never find a more wretched hive sean@epoptic.com | of scum and villainy. --Obi-Wan Kenobi
On 11/19/06, Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.com wrote:
Fraud.
Interesting approach but I'm not aware of any case law (not that I have really looked). Remeber it requires more than just false claims to equal fraud.
Sean Barrett wrote:
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geni stated for the record:
On 11/19/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
You are not "free to try and claim" so much as "it is very rare that people ever get taken to court for false copyright claims over PD material, even though it is illegal."
How is it illegal?
Fraud.
Indeed, plagiarism (claiming someone else's work as your own) is an extreme problem in academic and creative circles. It is even bigger than cheating on exams as a form of academic fraud, and indeed strikes at the very soul of the academic and scientific processes.
Additionally, Hollywood is plagued with plagiarism and even more so with accusations of plagiarism. Given the amount of money and energy that goes into every media production, the stakes in such battles are enormous. Literature has similar problems, with similarly high stakes: the novel "The Bear went Over the Mountain" is a wonderful satire on a subject that most writers quake in their boots addressing.
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Michael Hopcroft stated for the record:
Sean Barrett wrote:
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geni stated for the record:
On 11/19/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
You are not "free to try and claim" so much as "it is very rare that people ever get taken to court for false copyright claims over PD material, even though it is illegal."
How is it illegal?
Fraud.
Indeed, plagiarism (claiming someone else's work as your own) is an extreme problem in academic and creative circles. It is even bigger than cheating on exams as a form of academic fraud, and indeed strikes at the very soul of the academic and scientific processes.
Additionally, Hollywood is plagued with plagiarism and even more so with accusations of plagiarism. Given the amount of money and energy that goes into every media production, the stakes in such battles are enormous. Literature has similar problems, with similarly high stakes: the novel "The Bear went Over the Mountain" is a wonderful satire on a subject that most writers quake in their boots addressing.
All true, but what does plagiarism have to do with copyright?
- -- Sean Barrett | You've got to be careful if you don't sean@epoptic.com | know where you're going because | you might not get there. --Yogi Berra
Sean Barrett wrote:
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geni stated for the record:
On 11/19/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
You are not "free to try and claim" so much as "it is very rare that people ever get taken to court for false copyright claims over PD material, even though it is illegal."
How is it illegal?
Fraud.
506(c) of the U.S. Copyright Law:
(c) Fraudulent Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500.
This is quite low for a maximum fine, and the burden of proving fraudulent intent and knowledge that the claim is false may be enough to make this section unusable.
(re-sent) Ec
On 11/19/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/19/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
You are not "free to try and claim" so much as "it is very rare that people ever get taken to court for false copyright claims over PD material, even though it is illegal."
How is it illegal?
It is illegal (in the US) to make claim that you own the copyright to something that is in the public domain.
(Obviously I'm aware of the fact that this would, in the end, rest on the decision that scanning a PD work does not create a new copyright, but I find it very hard to believe that anyone with half an understanding of copyright law and its intentions would think that merely putting a photo on a scanner and hitting "scan" counts as "creativity" sufficient to take something out of the public domain).
That would be the result of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.
Technically it is the result of (the much more important) Feist v. Rural (1990) and its implications for what it means to be "creative", and technically you are mixing up the reasoning with the enforcement (the case is the enforcement, the reasoning about creativity and rote copying existed before that case), but yeah, obviously I was referring to that.
First the scan was made in the UK so slightly different laws apply. Secondly the scan is not perfect you will note that some lines that should be striaght were bent. Still up to this stage your no creativity holds since the only changes were due to my being in a hurry and doing a rather poor job. However it doesn't stop there. The image was cropped. Is that non creative? Then User:Steinsky takes the scan and cleans it up and shapens it a bit. is that non creative? remeber it is likely that User:Steinsky has never seen the original so they are probably not trying to recreate it.
It's a derivative work even at best, and courts have long established (in fair use cases) that making small modifications does not always count as "creativity". I don't think that's a very tough case, in the end -- does cropping a public domain image suddenly give you the right to claim that no one else is allowed to crop the same public domain image in the same way? A judge would either have to be an idiot or drunk to think that made sense. Of course I don't put it past a judge to be either of those things! ;-)
"ignorance of the law is no excuse" There are many problems caused by poor understanding of IP law this is just one of them.
Well, of course.
FF
Fastfission wrote:
I don't think that's a very tough case, in the end -- does cropping a public domain image suddenly give you the right to claim that no one else is allowed to crop the same public domain image in the same way?
Copyright, unlike patents, does not protect ideas. If two people independently arrive with the same result they may both be entitled to a copyright when they have both been creative. These kind of issues most commonly arise in cases of copyright infringement of a melody in music. Except for very short material this kind of independent duplication is virtually impossible. It is a possibility in dictionaries where the merger principle also applies.
(re-sent) Ec
geni wrote:
On 11/17/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Big media companies do this all the time. For example, if you go to a bookstore and buy a recent printing of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I think you'll find that the publisher has claimed copyright on *their copy* of Tenniel's illustrations and/or Carroll's text. (Dover, at least, is a happy exception.)
Under UK law they could claim copyright on the typesetting for 20 years. I don't know what the law in the US is about this though.
That's not a problem, because we aren't really interested in their typeface, or any other format related effort on their part. When you scan and OCR a text the resulting typeface is quite generic.
In the museums will not back you up if you take it to court. The last thing they want is a Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp type case taken taken to a higher level which would remove any remaining grey area.
This is strategically sound on the part of the museums. They are well aware of the confusion that abides in copyright law, and that's just where they like things to be. It is also strategically sound for movie studios not to give specific permissions to use publicity stills, or record producers to allow the use of album covers. Certain uses will be on a wink and nod basis. That way they can reserve the initiative when someone really displeases them.
The upshot is that if copies are copyrightable, it can be effectively impossible to obtain your own free copy of a public domain work, if the original is inaccessible.
that would depend on the ethical system you are opperating under.
Ethics and law are not synonymous.
I am not a copyright lawyer and I don't know if the practices I've described are defensible from a copyright law point of view. (*I'm* certainly not defending them.) But I get the impression that they do happen all the time. In other words, the claim that someone "deserves protection for all the work they did (or the fees they paid) tracking down the old map and making the scan" is apparently accepted in practice.
Not really. What is accepted is that you are free to try and claim copyright on PD material.
Of course. You can put a copyright notice on your new edition of Alice in Wonderland, and if you wrote a new introduction to the work that introduction will be copyright protected. A copyright statement really means copyright to the extent that it is copyrightable. A claim of non-copyrightability is a much stronger defence than fair use to a charge of infringement. A person who produces a work of mixed copyright and non-copyrightable material is not going to lead you by the hand paragraph by paragraph to tell you which is which. As a user you have to figure that out for yourself.
(re-sent) Ec
Steve Summit wrote:
Zero wrote:
There is no artistic input to the result, and in this case the scanner even advertises that the computer file is a precise reproduction of the original.
There may be no artistic input, but some will claim that they deserve protection for all the work they did tracking down the old map and making the scan. To be lily-white, it can be argued that you're supposed to track down an original copy of the old map yourself, and make your own scan.
Protecting that effort was no doubt a motivation behind the 15-year database protection that has been adopted in the EU even for works that are long out of copyright. Fortunately, AFAIK, this has not been adopted (yet) outside the EU.
Lily-white strategy is often losing strategy because you choose to put yourself at a disadvantage before you start.
(On the other hand, if the computer file truly is a precise reproduction of the original, you can convince yourself that using it is fine, since the alleged copyright holder can't prove you're using their scan.)
And if the scanner claims that his is a precise reproduction when it has been altered for the purpose of protecting copyrights then the scan could very well be in breach of the author's moral rights.
This situation gets particularly interesting in the case of famous art. Most museums disallow cameras; casual visitors are not allowed to photograph or otherwise make copies of the artwork within, even though it's long out of copyright. If you're a publisher and you want to make a copy for an art book you're printing, you have to pay the museum a -- sometimes hefty -- licensing fee. Having paid this fee, you're not going to let people freeload on you, so you're going to slap your own copyright on your art book. And the museum will back you up on this: they make money on those licensing fees; in fact part of their licensed-copy agreement is often (I think) a requirement that the licensed copies disallow reproduction.
If you go into a museum and take surreptitious photos of long out of copyright paintings you do so at your own risk. You may have a breach of contract in your personal relation with the museum, but that is not a copyright issue even when you put your pictures on the net. They can kick you out if they catch you, but they may not have the right to seize your camera or its contents.
I rather liked the practice in the National Museum in Budapest. Admission is free, but you need to pay a flat fee if you want to take pictures, a higher fee if you are using a movie camera. What you do with the pictures afterwards is your business.
(re-sent) Ec
On 11/17/06, zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com wrote:
I have an actual situation as follows. Someone has taken an old map (long out of copyright), scanned it onto their computer, and now claims to hold copyright on the scan.
It seems to me this is a bluff. A computer scan should not be any different from a photocopy. There is no artistic input to the result, and in this case the scanner even advertises that the computer file is a precise reproduction of the original.
Am I wrong?
Thanks, Zero.
It depends what country you are in and what country they are in. Unless you are in the US or Switzerland the answer is that while it probably is bluff it could be an expensive one to call. If they are not in those two counties they are not refuring to you.
geni wrote:
On 11/17/06, zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com wrote:
I have an actual situation as follows. Someone has taken an old map (long out of copyright), scanned it onto their computer, and now claims to hold copyright on the scan.
It seems to me this is a bluff. A computer scan should not be any different from a photocopy. There is no artistic input to the result, and in this case the scanner even advertises that the computer file is a precise reproduction of the original.
It depends what country you are in and what country they are in. Unless you are in the US or Switzerland the answer is that while it probably is bluff it could be an expensive one to call. If they are not in those two counties they are not refuring to you.
Assuming good faith on the part of the scanner, it is probably ignorance instead of a bluff. I doubt that he has taken the time to read this mailing list to glean our accumulated wiki-wisdom about copyright.
(re-sent) Ec