[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:44 PM, Jussi-Ville
Heiskanen<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:
>>
>> Remember that  the number of (highly skilled) staff required to
>> operate that sort of process may not show up on the NPG payroll, as
>> they may contract that sort of work out to others.
>>
> Granted without a question. But that just begs the question.
> If they are claiming a "creative act" in producing the image,
> and not being satisfied in acknowledging they are just copying
> it, is it not really even "best practices" for them to acknowledge
> the authorship to the person doing the creativity? Personally I
> think aggressive approaches by them for some purported
> creative function they have provided, when not even supplying
> the name who might have standing to declare their creative
> contribution was being impinged upon, is frankly ludicrous!
>
>> And my guess is that the photographer or scanners or other people paid
>> to do this were doing nothing more nor less than as professional a job
>> as they could do, to earn the money they were contracted to be paid.
>> Not everyone has noble thoughts about free culture and freeing public
>> domain material, running through their minds all the time.
>>
> Just being professional doesn't mean you aren't being creative.
> I want to be very clear about that. But even if you are being
> very inventive in the solutions you employ in producing a good
> and professional _result_; the result would in most cases aim
> to be "faithful" to the original image, and not to impart some
> "creative spark" from the forehead of the photographer themselves,
> which would forever mark the image as the work of that and no
> other fungible photographer, I rather suspect.

Agreed. Ironically, if the NPG *had* done photographs of the portraits
in their gallery settings, including the 3D frames and with lighting
and angle considerations, and there had been a developed 'style' of
how to frame the photographs of the pictures, that would be a greyer
area than faithful archival quality scans. I think.

Carcharoth