On 9/9/06, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
On 9/9/06, Stephen Bain
<stephen.bain(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If the original author doesn't care about
attribution, or their rights
as photographer, or what happens to the image, then get them to assign
the copyright to someone else in a deed. Then the other person can do
whatever they want with the image, since they own the copyright.
Copyright assignment might work. But is the listed source supposed to
be the author or the copyright holder?
Usually it's both since they're one and the same, but we actually want the
copyright holder. It doesn't matter to us who took it, only who owns it,
since that's who would be using the license that we have to know. Same with
fair use images; we want to know the copyright holder, not some random
website with the image (though that is helpful if it says who the copyright
owner is).
Who owns the copyright is clearly more important than who owns the
picture or who physically took the picture. Former copyright ownership
should even be shown for PD images to help establish that they are in
fact PD.
Grandma's assignment could be a positive step forward, but asking her to
do that doesn't help if grandma's dead. The problem could continue for
another 70 years. While she was alive grandma was never concerned about
who took the pictures in the family album, and the copyrights that might
go along with those pictures. She never bothered to make a will,
because she never had anything of monetary value. In the simplest
posthumous situation grandma had two children, who are both still alive,
but can't get along with each other on anything. One wants to protect
what he believes to be the sacred memory of grandma by allowing nothing
to be made public; the other considers it a celebration of grandma to
publish everything. As the number of children and grandchildren
increases things can only get worse. In fact, any one of the children
(and any one of the grandchildren whose parent is deceased) can release
the material without regard to the others' claims of copyright.
Ec