Well, the case you are thinking of is surely Bridgeman v. Corel. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_v._Corel) or something that affirms it (like the recent Meshwerks v. Toyota). I understand that at the moment Wikipedia has a rather complicated determination of whether they use it or not.
Most of the legal question revolves around whether there is a lot of creativity in doing a reproduction. There are arguments on either side of things. Still, I think in the case of Corbis, the fact that at most they are just putting a photo onto a flat-bed scanner, maybe applying "auto-contrast" to the results (or doing some other sort of color syncing), ought to preclude the idea that they are doing anything "creative" in such cases.
(One thing that has long annoyed me in the discussions about Bridgeman is that the question is always posed as whether or not the adjustments were creative enough to generate a new copyright. In my mind this ignores the question of whether they are creative enough to generate a new copyright _and thus give the modifier monopoly control over the previous public domain material_. Moving things from the public to the private domain is a dangerous game and should only be reserved for truly substantial and worthwhile efforts to rehabilitate something that would otherwise be fairly useless -- massive restorations of crumbling things that require an amount of artistry on par with that which created the restored object in question -- and not just tweaking the reds and greens a bit, removing a scratch here or there with the clone tool. In my opinion. But I am neither a lawyer nor a judge.)
FF
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 2:25 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
<<In a message dated 1/13/2009 10:28:59 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, fastfission@gmail.com writes:
I once e-mailed them about this and the person who e-mailed me back said that they were claiming the copyright on the _scans_, not the images themselves.>>
That is sort of the argument I was making a while ago, and I was greatly interested in the recent copyright case where some museum (I can't remember the details) was claiming copyright over high quality images they produced of old (flat) artworks (i.e. paintings or drawings).
The case went against them I believe and the reasoning was repeated here on this list just recently. It would seem pretty clear that the same reasoning could be used against say Google books scans of old documents/books/maps. That these scans themselves enjoy no special ability for a new copyright claim vis a vis the expiration of old copyrights (pre 1922).
Will Johnson
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