Re: [WikiEN-l] Grandmother copyrighted anonymous works

On 9/11/06, Jason Potkanski <electrawn(a)electrawn.com> wrote: As was pointed out, copyright protects creative expression, not ideas. However, I think you're on the right track here. What is copyrightable in a photo? Assuming everything in the photo is public domain (or incidental fair use/fair dealing), what's copyrightable is the choice of a particular place, direction, zoom level, and moment in time. In more sophisticated photos (not point and shoot) there's the choice of F-stop, exposure, etc, but we'll ignore that as it doesn't really apply. In the case of a photographer who literally just presses the button, there would be almost no creative input (I suppose the exact moment in time was chosen), and therefore s/he would probably have no copyright interest. I say probably because there is of course that issue of moment in time. More likely the photographer also chose to some extent the zoom and the framing of the photograph, so they'd probably have an argument that they have some copyright interest. But if you set the scene, posing with your friend in front of the Eiffel tower at 6 PM on a cloudy evening, then you put creative input into the photo too, and you probably have some copyright interest too. I believe the preceding is fairly standard across different jurisdictions. The following is more likely to be US-specific. Copyright law has rules for such situations where more than one person has put creative interest into a work. There are two possibilities - it is a work for hire or there is a joint copyright. I don't think such an unpaid scenario would qualify as a work for hire so more likely there would be a joint copyright. What are the rules of a joint copyright situation? Any joint copyright holder can grant a non-exclusive license (such as CC-BY-SA or the GFDL) to anyone, for any reason, but the joint copyright holders must share any financial gain they derive from exclusive use of the work. Of course, in conclusion, yes, this is sort of a long discussion in pointlessness, because the fact of the matter is that the person who pushed the button on your camera almost surely just doesn't care. But some Wikipedians like to cross their Ts and dot their Is, and they even like to force other Wikipedians to do so. So in some sense it is useful to think about this for the case of those Wikipedians, just to get them off our backs.