[Wikimediaau-l] The A E "Bert" Roberts photograph collection

[John Vandenberg]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 10:11 AM, Craig Franklin <craig at halo-17.net> wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> Unfortunately the physical objects that the collection is based upon (the glass plate negatives) are in a locked cupboard somewhere in the QM warehouse, so the possibility of getting our hands on them and making our own copies are fairly remote.
>
> I've deliberately worded the info in the infobox to be slightly ambiguous - QM *claim* copyright on the digitisation (much the same as the NPG in the UK), but there has not been a legal case here in Australia to my knowledge or the knowledge of QM's copyright people to confirm whether the "sweat of the brow" doctrine would hold up in an Australian court.  We only say that QM "assert" copyright over the digitisation, not that we recognise that particular claim.  And because the digitisation part is then released under a free, acceptable licence, the whole shebang is fine to go on Commons.

the template is here: [[commons:Template:QM_Infobox]]
watchlist it! ;-)

> The images are tagged PD because they are unquestionably PD in the United States, which is what really matters in this case, but it's worth mentioning that there is a possible bit of CC-BY-SA-3.0 in there just so that nobody in Australia or the UK gets caught out.

A similar example of a claim like this is:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phineas_Gage_Cased_Daguerreotype_WilgusPhoto2008-12-19_Unretouched_Color.jpg

and the derivative

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phineas_Gage_Daguerreotype_WilgusPhoto2008-12-19_CroppedInsideMat_Unretouched_BW.jpg

Legally we are better off having a CC image than a PD image - the
definition of the latter can change.

For cases like this, it would be nice to have a
CC-0-digitised-attribution license which requires attribution of the
digitiser, but does not assert copyright over it.

nice work Craig!

--
John Vandenberg