[WikiEN-l] Used-with-permission images, a modest proposal

Tue Jul 5 10:00:32 UTC 2005

> The photograph is of a book over 1000 years old, so the art itself is in
> the public domain. The photograph on the library website is of the book,
> framed by a ruler and colour scale. And then, a nice little " Copyright
> © The British Library" down the bottom. Now AFAICT (and IANAL), there is
> nothing creative about that photograph. I find their claim of copyright
> spurious, to say the least.

Ah, but you see - British copyright laws may
not require any creativity for a work to become
copyrighted, unlike U.S. laws. Look at these
definitions from the laws:

-----------------------------------------------
"photograph" means a recording of light or other radiation on any medium
on which an image is produced or from which an image may by any means be
produced, and which is not part of a film;

In this Part "artistic work" means—
 (a) a graphic work, photograph, sculpture or collage, irrespective of
artistic quality,
-----------------------------------------------

I am not a lawyer either. I'm not even British.

For the record I think the idea that the British Library
can copyright this image to be evil. There are lots of
pictures of old artworks at their website which I'd love
to plunder. But it would be nice to establish the legal
status of doing so under British law.

Another example. Look at the second picture on the
[[Sleipnir]] article. I got it from the Danish Royal
Library here:

http://base.kb.dk/pls/hsk_web/hsk_vis.side?p_hs_loebenr=4&p_sidenr=194&p_illnr=1&p_frem=2&p_tilbage=2&p_navtype=rel&p_lang=eng

And that's right, there's a nasty little Copyright tag
there at the bottom of the page. They also have a copyright
statement in English:

http://www.kb.dk/elib/ophavsret/index-en.htm

As for Danish copyright laws it seems from my non-lawyer
reading that they "protect" any photograph, regardless
of creativity. I hope this sort of non-sense wouldn't
hold up in a Danish court but I really don't know if
it would.

When I've asked questions about such things in the past
I'm told that since the Wikipedia servers are in the U.S.
we can rely on U.S. laws (in this case Bridgeman v. Corel).
I'm fine with that personally, and it would be almost
impossible to revert that policy by now. But people should
at least be aware of the issues that may arise for someone
publishing Wikipedia outside of the U.S. They're potentially
more serious than a few clearly tagged used-with-permission
images would be.

Regards,
Haukur