On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Correct me if am I wrong somebody but I do believe
that an image copyright
holder has the right to keep a restrictive copyright on a full resolution
image AND also spin off lower resolution versions under other less
restrictive licenses.
You're correct, the full resolution graphic and the lower resolution
graphics have seperate copyrights.
However in our case it would be better if we had the full resolution
graphics available as if a graphic ever needs to be resized to fit the
article better it is far better to change the size and then reduce the
resolution of a graphic than doing it the other way round.
Having the full resolution graphics for material (other than original
material from our contributors) would involve grater risks of copyright
violation than reduced resolution images. Even assuming that there is
unlimited storage space for these images, we have no practical use for
most of the full resolution images anyway. Why not store them at the
maximum resolution that we may reasonably require?
Storing reduced resolution images means that we have already addressed
the substantiality factor for fair use. Anyone that copies from us
cannot make his images any more substantial than us.