[Commons-l] Copyright is hard (was Re: Professional photographers on Commons: sucess story)

[Andrew Gray]

[Clearing out the drafts - for some reason I forgot to send this a month ago]

On 07/11/2007, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's just so hard. Even if you wanted to minimise troubles and only
> pick images from Flickr, you have to know which licenses are the
> acceptable ones. Then - is this a derivative of anything else? Is it
> reasonable that this user is in fact the copyright holder? Has this
> user understood what they have agreed to by picking this license? What
> if they change it? And this is an easy case. Pick up random-website
> "attribution" like statements, or PD-age related questions and you can
> soon give yourself a nice headache, trying to find the correct answer
> when the fact is there is no one in the world that knows for sure what
> it is, you only get that certainty with an expensive lawsuit.

A somewhat-related problem that I encounter is that when people do get
their heads around copyright, it becomes the most significant piece of
metadata they can imagine; they go looking for copyright releases in
an exhaustive and often futile way.

I have lost count - really - of the number of times that I've had to
explain to people that if a publisher says material is "public domain"
and then says it's copyrighted in the same sentence, they probably
didn't mean the magic copyright sense of public domain, and we don't
get to play nomic to prove they did...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk