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

[geni]

2009/1/16  <WJhonson at aol.com>:

> "Point to" versus "take".  Two separate things.
> I'm not disputing the right to link to an image on bible.org.  I'm  disputing
> the right to take that image and post it to flicker.com
>
> And "what if there is no museum image" only means that we are in the same
> position as "what if we have no free image of Britney Spears eating a hot dog
> for our hot dog page??".  I.E. we're not worse off than we've been for five
> thousand years.
>
> The mere fact that an image now exists, doesn't mean we get the right to do
> whatever we want with it.

Under common law we have the right to do anything that is not illegal.

> And the mere fact that no image exists, doesn't mean we get the right to do
> whatever it takes to get one.

We have the right to anything legal to get one.

> We still are ethically bound to follow standard protocol, and not rock the
> image boat.

Not under any of the commonly held systems of ethics within liberal
democracies.

> If we adhere to the idea that any scan of a PD item is a voluntary act to
> freely distribute such scan to the world for any purpose than the end result is
> that the massive scanners will simply stop scanning and we won't have
> anything  free, limited, for pay, or what.

We will deal with that if it happens. For various reasons I strongly
suspect it won't.

-- 
geni