Copyright Question

[Jeremy Doyle]

[jon agnew] “A valid point…so maybe I’ll work an hour a day then spend the rest of my time at the beach or on the COW.”

with as many copyright questions that come through here, I think this plan could work

[Chris Blair]

Many public domain photographs are part of “special collections” housed in Universities, libraries, museums and historical societies. The collection was usually given to the institution by a photographer, collector, family member…whatever. These institutions have to house, catalog, care for, and often restore these collections. That takes money and time. Sometimes a lot of both.

So while they may not own the rights to the photographs in a legal sense, they certainly have earned the right to a little bit of payback and courtesy from those that benefit from their historical preservation.

More importantly…some of these collections were given to the institutions with strict usage guidelines that I’m not sure fall under any sort of public domain usage rights. A curator at a museum we worked with on a documentary basically said most of these collections are considered private. Meaning it would be like you taking a bunch of personal photographs from a family’s collection (regardless of the age of the photos), and using them for whatever you want and claiming they’re in the public domain. They’re not public. They’re private based on the terms of the agreement a lot of these institutions have with the familes or previous owners.

Seems weird when most of the institutions are public entities, but that’s how it was explained to me.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Richard Herd]

[Aaron Cadieux] “How would someone know that I obtained that photo from their book (unless they altered the picture), and not some other source (since the photo is in the public domain)?”

More than likely, they’ll never know.

You have raised a particular lex causae, a conflict of laws.

One law says “after x amount of time a work becomes a work in the public domain.”

Another law says “entity y controls the work.”

As a member of society, I would argue we are bound by our word and good faith. That is, just because a law cannot be enforced does not mean the law is void and or that we should try to get away with it.

🙂