[WikiEN-l] Copyright of newly found image of Phineas Gage from 1850

[Jay Litwyn]

"Brian" <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote in message 
news:9839a05c0907181130y31750611u1d6c29c9e36842c9 at mail.gmail.com...
>A daguerreotype of a well adjusted [[Phineas Gage]] holding the rod that
> impaled his frontal lobes was recently discovered. It will be published in
> The Journal of the History of the Neurosciences imminently. It was, in my
> opinion, correctly uploaded to Commons under the Public Domain. It is, 
> after
> all, an uncreative photograph of a daguerreotype made in the 1850s by an
> unknown photographer.
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phineas_Gage.jpg
>
> That said, have a look at the copyright text of the image claimed by the
> gallery that took the photo.
>
> http://brightbytes.com/phineasgage/index.html
>
> **NOTE* We are not claiming copyright to the work of an anonymous 1850s
> photographer but to the photograph we made of this object in our 
> possession.
> Since you can't upload a daguerreotype to the internet and no one else 
> could
> possibly have photographed this object for over 30 years, the only
> photographs available are the ones we have made.*
>
> *For several years we have had an informal business supplying images in 
> our
> collection <http://brightbytes.com/past_tense/index.html> to publishers,
> film, and television producers. We often grant permission for educational
> and non-profit usage.*
>
> *High resolution photographs without a watermark are available for
> reproduction. Contact us for information on usage fees.*
> *
> *My reading of this is that they claim copyright of the image and that 
> they
> often allow educational and non-profit institutions to use versions of the
> images that contain watermarks.

I am reading it like this: "We will provide higher quality without 
watermarks. If you want to spend the time or trouble procuring them for 
yourself and explaining why even copies on another medium are also in the 
public domain, then you will probably get away with it, but we will not make 
it easy for you to hide your source, and we might even raise legal 
difficulties for you, somewhere." (like here) In short, I would not worry 
about the watermarks, unless I was familiar with how uniform copyright law 
is in this world. Consider that we could hide millions of such images in the 
space of one glass container, so their costs in storage space for all these 
years is several orders of magnitude greater than ours. In short, I would 
not waste time hiding the courtesy.