On 31/07/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Personally I think there is a lot of room for a little commonsense flexibiity in images -- people get all bent out of shape about whether or not it is hypothetical that the German government could decide to enforce all copyrights on Nazi photographs that defaulted to them, even though there is no reason to think that they ever will and it is questionable whether or not they have the legal standing to do that even if they wanted to. Ditto with people worrying that just because you can copyright a lighting arrangement scheme, suddenly all photographs of the building with this scheme become derivative works and copyright infringement. In both cases the legal danger is entirely hypothetical and dubious at that -- they are based on stretched and literal interpretations of complicated aspects of the copyright law and nobody has ever been taken to court over them. And yet they are used to delete widely circulated historical content (the Nazi images) or even user-produced free content (in terms of the lighting and architecture issues).
Although I entirely agree with you on the Nazi copyright issue (though I think the images copyrights defaulted to Bavaria, which further complicates matters). Buildings are a problem for our contributors. A well known example of this is the Eiffel Tower whose owners have been known to chase down those who claim copyright over night-time pictures of the tower due to the particular way they arrange the lights.