[WikiEN-l] Grandmother copyrighted anonymous works

[Anthony]

On 9/11/06, Jason Potkanski <electrawn at electrawn.com> wrote:
> Disclaimer: IANAL
>
> Copyright in the US seems rather clear. Copyright is designed to
> protect ideas and to a limited extent the expression of those ideas.
> Follow the money.

As was pointed out, copyright protects creative expression, not ideas.
 However, I think you're on the right track here.

What is copyrightable in a photo?  Assuming everything in the photo is
public domain (or incidental fair use/fair dealing), what's
copyrightable is the choice of a particular place, direction, zoom
level, and moment in time.  In more sophisticated photos (not point
and shoot) there's the choice of F-stop, exposure, etc, but we'll
ignore that as it doesn't really apply.

> Who is the creator, who is the producer? The person
> owning the camera had the creative idea and the funds (by owning the
> camera and developing the film) to take the picture at that location.
> The random tourist just plays the role of the photographer, but has no
> claim to copyright.
>
In the case of a photographer who literally just presses the button,
there would be almost no creative input (I suppose the exact moment in
time was chosen), and therefore s/he would probably have no copyright
interest.  I say probably because there is of course that issue of
moment in time.

More likely the photographer also chose to some extent the zoom and
the framing of the photograph, so they'd probably have an argument
that they have some copyright interest.  But if you set the scene,
posing with your friend in front of the Eiffel tower at 6 PM on a
cloudy evening, then you put creative input into the photo too, and
you probably have some copyright interest too.

I believe the preceding is fairly standard across different
jurisdictions.  The following is more likely to be US-specific.

Copyright law has rules for such situations where more than one person
has put creative interest into a work.  There are two possibilities -
it is a work for hire or there is a joint copyright.  I don't think
such an unpaid scenario would qualify as a work for hire so more
likely there would be a joint copyright.

What are the rules of a joint copyright situation?  Any joint
copyright holder can grant a non-exclusive license (such as CC-BY-SA
or the GFDL) to anyone, for any reason, but the joint copyright
holders must share any financial gain they derive from exclusive use
of the work.

Of course, in conclusion, yes, this is sort of a long discussion in
pointlessness, because the fact of the matter is that the person who
pushed the button on your camera almost surely just doesn't care.  But
some Wikipedians like to cross their Ts and dot their Is, and they
even like to force other Wikipedians to do so.  So in some sense it is
useful to think about this for the case of those Wikipedians, just to
get them off our backs.

> "my camera, my idea, but you held it and pushed the button." Your
> idea, you own it.
>
> -jtp Electrawn