On 28 July 2017 at 21:36, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Nobody believes that claiming copyright on 2,000 year
old works
And this is where your failure to understand English and Welsh law and
the history of artifact handling become a problem.
Your mistake is in assuming the only work here is from the 2000 year
old sculptor and bronze worker. This is of course not the case. The
reality is both items will have been subject to a certain degree of
cleaning and "restoration" (you don't give British museum catalogue
numbers so I can't look up exactly what). This is pretty common for
any ah "headline" item that didn't go straight from the dig to a
museum. Victorian collectors wanted complete statues for their
collection and even today things can get a lot of work done to them
(the Crosby Garrett Helmet for example).
The Roman statue presumably entered the UK pre-1972 (if it didn't we
have bigger concerns than copyright) which means there is a good
chance it is from the imaginative restoration era. Has the restorer
been dead for 70 years? I don't know and I don't think you do.
The jug won't have come out of the ground looking like that. Has
enough work been done to qualify for copyright or is it old enough for
life+70 to have expired? I don't know. Do you?
--
geni