On Wed, 04 Aug 2004 11:25:34 -0700 Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I would be curious to know what policy these galleries apply with regard to photography by individual visitors to the gallery.
Probably they either disallow it, or require such photographs to hand over copyright.
I think too that there is a question of burden of proof involved. Even if their principle legal premise is correct they need to prove that our picture was taken from their website, rather than us needing to prove that it was from somewhere else. Also if their premise is correct that there is a copyright in these reproduction, an individual who has taken his own photograph of a picture would not lose his own copyright on the basis that he had violated a no-photography rule.
I agree. In general copyright laws are there to protect artistic works. If publishing the reproduction breaks copyright, then apparently the reproduction has some artistic merit - which means that it should be distinguishable from other reproductions of the same work. Thus, if they have any ground for claiming that the reproductions are copyrighted, they should be able to say which reproduction's copyright was being infringed upon.
Then again, I am not a lawyer, and these laws often do not go with my layman's opinion (in fact, they often go with whoever is willing to pay their lawyers most, I'm afraid). It would be good to have a real expert opinion on this.
Another observation that I would make is that any copyrights to these reproductions must be determined separately. Without that, how can we know the copyright date of a specific photograph? Without the copyright date, how can we know when the copyright expires? What is meant by publishing? If the same photograph was used to produce a postcard in 1930 the copyright on that would certainly have expired. Whose courts have jurisdiction?
That's a very good point too. Let _them_ prove that it is not an image from before they got the work, or from more than 50/70/100 (depending on country) years old.
Naturally, taking a stand on this requires more research than these off the cuff remarks. Still I think that it is inevitable that as the putative copyright holders see their revenue streams threatened they will take action to protect those streams. Sooner or later there will be a legal confrontation; what we need to know is which actions are worth defending.
I agree. It would also be good to have a discussion going with a gallery like this - what about offering them a link for each work of 'theirs' that's on our site. Problem is of course the GNU/FDL - as we do not believe them to be copyright holders, we cannot require of downstream users to keep that kind of thing.
Andre Engels