On 5/21/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay(a)bigpond.com> wrote:
If it's so unremarkable and so uncreative,
isn't the whole
question of copyright totally moot?
Hardly. We put a lot of effort into monitoring the license status of
photographs in WP. It doesn't matter if the photographs themselves are
good
or bad, exciting or boring.
I think it does matter what the chances of the copyright violatee making a
complaint are. I could be wrong on this. But if we are to focus our efforts
anywhere, surely they should be areas where there actually is a potential
complainant.
Can you claim copyright
over the way you parked your car? Over the way
you filled in
a cheque? Over your choice of TV watching on a given night?
????
Well, apparently you can copyright pointing a device that takes a photo and
pressing a button - with no further creative input. As you pointed out,
it's not necessarily a creative process.
I wouldn't call it a bad photograph. It's slightly tilted, but that's easily
fixed. There's no sparkle to it, but that's
more the fault of the lighting
than anything else. From the subject's point of view it is pretty good. It
shows him in front of a famous landmark and is admirably suited to the
user's page, showing what he is doing.
It's funny, again, very likely the fact that it's in a front of a landmark
and that it has him in it is almost certainly his doing. The fact that it's
tilted is the photographer's, but the subject could easily "fix" that -
again pointing to the subject as having the greater creative input.
My problem lies with the fact that he has called himself the creator of the
photograph and released it into the public domain when
to my mind
copyright
belongs to the photographer rather than the subject.
I have a collection of several thousand digital photos taken with my camera.
I'm sure one of these days I'll inadvertently, or without thinking too much,
claim to be the creator of one that I didn't actually take. Hell, there are
lots of near-duplicates where I took one and my girlfriend took the other. I
don't think this is a case where claiming copyright over the wrong one is
really going to cause anybody a great deal of harm.
Sure. But there is no evidence in this photograph that
the subject "set
the
settings", as you surmised earlier. It looks like a straight "point and
shoot" image to me.
Yep.
Steve