Thanks. I didnt search. I looked in the last 250 revisions of the page. I didnt look back far enough.
John Vandenberg. sent from Galaxy Note On Sep 17, 2012 8:42 PM, "Strainu" strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
Have you searched for it?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2012/09#Poten...
2012/9/17 John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com:
Where is the onwiki discussion about this? I could find '[1]'
Or a wikipedia page that describes the copyright status of imagery of
DSOs?
John Vandenberg. sent from Galaxy Note On Sep 15, 2012 1:25 PM, "とある白い猫" to.aru.shiroi.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I am not seeking legal advice. I am asking the pursuit of the issue.
I am
not a US citizen so I do not have a congress person to contact. The laws governing copyright can be amended to address the issue of deep space objects (DSO). I do not expect a result next week, I merely want the
issue
to enter into an agenda of some sort. If the Foundation is going to take the lead, this probably would only be possible through a board
decision. In
such a case I want to work with people to come up with such a draft proposal to the board.
I realize this is an unusual request but there seems to be a lack of clarity on this issue[1]. Argument is that copyright can be an issue
since
not every organization observing or assisting NASA's observations are PD-USgov compatible. We may be forced to permanently delete all deep
space
objects as a result.
I'd like to provide a short technical explanation why copyright of
deep
space objects or DSOs (objects outside of the solar system) are meaningless. For ordinary photographs copyright is determined by factors such as lighting, perspective, exposure and other such settings that creates a different image of the same object. You can distinguish the difference between a daylight photo and an evening photo.
With deep space objects however, even the stellar parallax[2] has a
very
small value. The closest object outside of the solar system is 4.24
light
years (268,136 AU's) away. The semi-major axis of earth is about 1AUs.
The
difference in perspective is like looking at a 2cm (width of a nickel)
wide
object 5.3km (3.29 miles) away and the perspective difference is
switching
left eye to the right eye. We lack scientific instruments to even
detect a
stellar parallax for objects much further. In other words our
perspective
of the nearest star and beyond is more or less constant and the objects themselves look the same for hundreds of years.
So any photo of a deep space object I or someone else takes from the solar system will look identical regardless of when and where on earth I take it within multiple lifetimes. I think this can bring legal
precedent
for us to either disregard any copyright claim or at least pursue
lawmakers
in congress to amend the copyright law to make an exception in the law. People who worked with congress such as Neil Degrasse Tyson could be consulted to this end. Also international treaties[3] can be consulted
to
this end as copyrighting photos of deep space objects could be
interpreted
as an unfair exploitation of resources.
I realize this reads like something out of Star Trek but this is
growing
to be quite a problem as we see more and more weird copyright claims
even
when dealing with NASA which traditionally had a PD-USgov mentality.
NASA
regularly contracts its more recent projects and to be fair we do not
know
how NASA contracts these projects which could potentially lead to legitimate copyright claims in the future.
[1]:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Potential_deletion_of...
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