Bryan Derksen wrote:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
What would you say if I told you that I had located the *original* high-res version of the "O RLY owl", sans the text, and that it had a clear copyright notice? The "O RLY" version is a copvio - so, our "fair use" claim was in error.
This argument came up in the image talk page and I don't see how it works. My understanding of copyright law on this matter:
The photographer created the photo and held copyright to it, and then someone else came along and created a derivative work out of it. As a derivative work, the copyright is jointly owned - both the photographer and the ORLY-writer hold copyright over the resulting image and so the permission of both is needed for it to be copied (unless such an addition is too trivial to warrant a copyright in the first place, in which case the photographer's the sole copyright holder to Orly.jpg. I don't think this changes anything as far we're concerned, though).
The problem here is that the O RLY website was claiming copyright over their image and not acknowleding the original author - kind of like what Baidupedia are doing.