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

[Ian Woollard]

On 14/01/2009, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> 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.

It's not legally true either. For example if a newspaper or magazine
gets a PD image from Corbis and publishes it, they *are* bound by
their contract they made with Corbis to obtain the image.

However, readers aren't so bound. If one of them copies the image,
they have every right to do so, and are not legally (and probably not
morally either) obliged to credit the magazine or Corbis, the readers
usually don't have any contractual obligation, and copyright doesn't
apply since it's still PD.

So Corbis does have some protection, even for PD images, from contract
law, but it's easily bypassed.

> Ec

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.