[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Jussi-Ville
Heiskanen<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:
>>
>> Most of that is the sale of contemporary copyrighted photographs (by
>> living photographers earning money from their trade). But some of that
>> will be the commercial sale of scans of PD stuff that gets free
>> culture people up in arms. The root of this issue is the commercial
>> exploitation of the public domain.
>>
>> My view is that if people are prepared to spend time, money and effort
>> in finding, collecting, keeping and conserving public domain material,
>> and then scanning it and digitising it, then there is nothing to
>> prevent people selling the end product of such labours. And people
>> will pay for that service.
>>
>> Whether it is morally right to exploit the public domain (by selling
>> such scans for money), and whether it is morally right to appropriate
>> the scans made by others (by insisting the scans are also public
>> domain), is something I can see arguments for on both sides of this
>> divide.
>>
>>
>
> What is most striking to my mind in this issue of
> use of images, is how the status quo differs from
> that with regard to _texts_.
>
> With texts, what you have are Project Gutenberg,
> The Internet Archive, Wikisource etc. pretty much
> all of them with some form of copyleft, or at least
> not asserting silly Copyprotect rationales (total PD
> in the case of PG, with merely the proviso of *not*
> attributing if you don't include the full disclaimer
> of the "license")
>
> I do know there have been cases of good quality
> scans of texts being hoarded, or being totally
> disallowed in the past, such as the case of the
> Dead Sea Scrolls, but I don't quite see them as
> being relevant in this context.

This might be because people will pay more money for images. Picture
worth a thousand words. That sort of thing. And a picture, or a sound
clip, or a video clip, or a multimedia clip, is less 'editable' than a
chunk of text. There is also a longer history of written and printed
text. Photography is relatively recent (last 150 years), cinema even
more recent. Look back at the history of written text before the
printing press came along, and see how much people hoarded
manuscripts, or freely copied them. Then look at how things developed
after the printing press came along, and how the "hoard" vs "freely
distribute" (and credit the creators and provide them with income)
debates developed. And look at the various ways people developed to
earn money from texts, images and cinema and video. Then throw in the
internet.

Carcharoth