[WikiEN-l] copyright on scanned copy?

Sun Nov 19 14:38:09 UTC 2006

On 11/17/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I am not a copyright lawyer and I don't know if the practices
> > I've described are defensible from a copyright law point of view.
> > (*I'm* certainly not defending them.)  But I get the impression
> > that they do happen all the time.  In other words, the claim that
> > someone "deserves protection for all the work they did (or the
> > fees they paid) tracking down the old map and making the scan"
> > is apparently accepted in practice.
> >
>
> Not really. What is accepted is that you are free to try and claim
> copyright on PD material.

You are not "free to try and claim" so much as "it is very rare that
people ever get taken to court for false copyright claims over PD
material, even though it is illegal."

CORBIS does the same thing, by the way -- they have a huge number of
PD images in their photo collections which are labeled as (c) CORBIS.
I think it is ethically indefensible -- one can want to protect ones
labors how one wants but copyright is supposed to protect creativity,
and scanning something -- no matter how hard it was to find or track
down -- requires no creativity. There are other ways to protect
content and labors other than false claims of copyright (esp. in a
culture which is hypersensitive about copyright in days of late). It
is a gross abuse of the ignorance of most people about copyright law.

FF