[Wikimedia-l] : Copyright of deep space objects (DSOs) outside of the solar system

[geni]

On 15 September 2012 07:24, とある白い猫 <to.aru.shiroi.neko at gmail.com> wrote:
>   Hi,
>
>   I am not seeking legal advice. I am asking the pursuit of the issue. I am
> not a US citizen so I do not have a congress person to contact. The laws
> governing copyright can be amended to address the issue of deep space
> objects (DSO). I do not expect a result next week, I merely want the issue
> to enter into an agenda of some sort. If the Foundation is going to take
> the lead, this probably would only be possible through a board decision. In
> such a case I want to work with people to come up with such a draft
> proposal to the board.
>
>   I realize this is an unusual request but there seems to be a lack of
> clarity on this issue[1]. Argument is that copyright can be an issue since
> not every organization observing or assisting NASA's observations are
> PD-USgov compatible. We may be forced to permanently delete all deep space
> objects as a result.
>
>   I'd like to provide a short technical explanation why copyright of deep
> space objects or DSOs (objects outside of the solar system) are
> meaningless. For ordinary photographs copyright is determined by factors
> such as lighting, perspective, exposure and other such settings that
> creates a different image of the same object. You can distinguish the
> difference between a daylight photo and an evening photo.
>
>   With deep space objects however, even the stellar parallax[2] has a very
> small value. The closest object outside of the solar system is 4.24 light
> years (268,136 AU's) away. The semi-major axis of earth is about 1AUs. The
> difference in perspective is like looking at a 2cm (width of a nickel) wide
> object 5.3km (3.29 miles) away and the perspective difference is switching
> left eye to the right eye. We lack scientific instruments to even detect a
> stellar parallax for objects much further. In other words our perspective
> of the nearest star and beyond is more or less constant and the objects
> themselves look the same for hundreds of years.
>
>   So any photo of a deep space object I or someone else takes from the
> solar system will look identical regardless of when and where on earth I
> take it within multiple lifetimes.

Not so. The results from the Atacama Desert are going to be far
clearer than the results from say Snowdonia. That is before we
consider the issues of different filters, exposure times and
instruments.

If you claim was true we could just team up with a couple of amateur
observetories (one in each hemisphere) and retake all the deep sky
images (which might not be an entirely bad thing anyway).


-- 
geni