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.
--
Alphax -
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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