On 1/25/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
It's been established in the US that you lose trade secret status with stuff in open court filings (hence a lot of sealed filings in civil cases), and that copyrighted stuff doesn't lose copyright but enters the "suitable for fair use in coverage in the media and legal commentary and the like" realm.
Which is fine, we have a whole set of rules for all that. The original claim was that the picture was a production of the US government, for which the main evidence seemed to be that it was introduced at a federal trial. We still don't know whether the picture was taken by a random person in the group or by a professional, and if the latter, who the professional was working for. Copyright paranoia? Well, I would be pretty angry if someone copied all of my photos, removed my name, and declared them "PD-USGov" on some flimsy pretext.
Yeah, I was responding in the general here.
I think it's fair use to use these, but they're clearly not PD-USGov; someone took them, and unless they released them in a way we don't know about, they're still private copyrighted photos.
It's copyright paranoia to say that there's no fair use to be found here. It's not copyright paranoia to take the PD-USGov tag off. The owner would have a perfect right to be upset over that.