On 9 July 2012 14:37, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 9 July 2012 14:08, Béria Lima berialima@gmail.com wrote:
Talking about that: What happened to the case? Someone has any info about it?
AIUI the state of play is: the EFF wrote back saying "your copyright claim is invalid, come on if you think you're hard enough", the images are still up, and NPG and WMF are still on speaking terms. NPG have occasionally made quiet noises asserting the copyright, but are observably *extremely reluctant* to actually push their big noisy legal threat one millimetre further.
This is what I mean when I say that the claim of such copyrights existing is really extremely insubstantial, and that if Adam wishes to make such a claim stick he really would have to push it all the way through the courts, and that shouting abuse at people on a mailing list really just doesn't cut it.
It was always my understanding that the issue in that case was the lack of creative work required in the reproduction; i.e. a straight on photo of a 2D medium. (I think they also did some touching up?? but nothing major).
Comparatively, some of Adam's work exhibits a much greater level of skill and creativity in reconstructing damaged images.
I'd say that the NPG's inability to demonstrate requisite creativity to claim "sweat of the brow" doesn't outright undermine Adam's situation.
Regardless; why are we being such dicks? As diametrically opposed to copyright as some of us are, it genuinely doesn't hurt anyone for those works to be tagged CC-BY-SA. They can still be reused widely, Adam gets credit for his hard work, and everyone is happy.
This smacks of cutting off our noses to spite our faces, all on principle...
It also undermines many of our strong points about copyright laws/reform.
Tom