Suppose I were in New York and went to TeaNY and took
a picture
of Moby waiting tables (he does sometimes; he owns the place).
I would then own the copyright to that picture. /But/ could it
ever be released under the GNU FDL? See, there are limitations
on what can be done with pictures of living (or even recently
deceased) people--they can't, for instance, be used to advertise
anything without the permission of that person or the estate.
These conditions seem more restrictive than those of the GNU FDL.
So is it at all possible to release a picture like that onto
wikipedia? Who knows anything about this?
It's not quite as bad as that--using the picture, displaying
it, even for profit, is fine, and the GFDL only grants to others
the rights you have under your copyright. You can't use it for
advertising for two reasons, neither of which is copyright. One,
that's making an implicit endorsement claim--you are saying, in
effect, that "Moby likes this product", and you can't do that
unless he actually does (or at least has given you permission to
say he does). It's not a matter of copyright, but commercial
fraud. The other problem is trademark: you can't use the image to
/identify/ something, just like you can't call your garage band
"Moby" or call your burger joint "MacDonald's", even if your name
really is Moby or MacDonald, because they have names with value
and reputation, and you can't legally trade on someone else's
reputation. Many people confuse copyrights and trademarks, but
the two have nothing at all to do with each other.
So we'd have no problem at all if you took a picture of Moby
and used it to illustrate his article--just like the New York
Times would have no trouble using one to illustrate an article
about music. And you further have the right to disclaim your
own copyright in the picture, and anyone else could thereby use
the picture in any way that wasn't constrained by those other
problems. We just can't call our site "Moby Encyclopedia" with
his face on the front page, and neither could anyone else,
copyright or none.
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