[WikiEN-l] Interesting article on restored copyrights in US works between...

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 5:43 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> WJhonson at aol.com wrote:
>> In a message dated 1/14/2009 12:33:41 AM Pacific Standard Time,
>> dgerard at gmail.com writes:
>>
>> This  does not square with copyright law in any way. It's also arguable
>> morally,  given their clear and blatant attempts to enclose the  public
>> domain.>>
>> ------------------------
>> Copyright and Credit are two seperate items.  We need to discuss them
>> seperately.
>> You don't Credit the Copyright holder.  You Credit your source, which  may or
>> may not be a copyright holder.
>>
>> You credit where *you* got it from.  You even "Credit" public domain  sources
>> such as "the Monroe County courthouse" which holds no copyrights on  anything
>> whatsoever.
>>
>> "Credit" doesn't need to know who holds the copyright, you are merely
>> stating what your own source was.  "Credit" has nothing to do with "Law",  it has to
>> do with "Normal scholarly citation methods"
>>
> You are only right to a limited extent.  While it makes sense to say
> that a given picture was from the Corbis archives, acknowledging only
> that reinforces the notion that they have the proper copyrights.  If
> Corbis fails to give proper credit to its source that fact too needs to
> be noted.

Turning it around and stepping into a time machine, it is interesting
to speculate about what people will think in 100 years time when they
are looking at a photograph and the credit is to "Pbroks13" to use a
random example of a featured picture. Will the people around then
argue whether some of the usernames used today are truly pseudonymous
or not, and get into long and involved arguments about that? And does
it make sense to talk about GFDL works eventually falling into the
public domain, and does it make any difference? :-)

Or to put it another way, is GFDL freer or less-free than PD?

Carcharoth