On 3/8/06, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote:
Not to spread too much FUD about an ongoing debate,
but a flaw with the
"use commons for all free images" theory is that a number of commoners
consider that German "design rights" laws mean that nearly all pictures
of designed objects, such as toys or furniture, are not free, and that
as a consequence most interior shots are not free either. (Outdoors pics
are covered by the "Panoramafreiheit" exception.) There is also a
problem with pre-1923 things marked "PD-US" that are not necessarily PD
worldwide.
Personally, I ignore the latter and freely upload pre-1923 US-sourced
images to Commons on a regular basis and have had nobody question
this. Images for which the copyright was held by a corporation, not
an individual, are likely to be free in most countries worldwide in
any case (since then date of publication or creation is the deciding
factor, not a death date).
As to the former, IMO, there are two aspects:
Firstly, that design rights laws are separate from copyright per se
and are more like trademark law. We do not exclude images based on
trademark law alone, even though the appearance of a trademark in an
image may render it unusable for certain commercial uses, e.g.
advertising of other products. Design rights laws I've seen, and I
believe the German one is similar, are intended to prohibit other
companies from producing 'knock-off' designs, not to prohibit
photographs that happen to have such objects in them. We should not
let paranoia over other restrictive laws concern us too much.
Are there actual German legal cases in which the appearance of objects
over which design-rights laws apply appearing in a photograph have
caused a lawsuit, let alone a successful one?
(any pointers to where on Commons this was discussed, since I missed it?)
Secondly, I do not think that one country's peculiar restrictive law
should remove things from Commons; in theory, once one rounded up
every country's odd laws, nothing could be left.
-Matt