Greetings all.

This is longish and straying from the original reason this thread
started. It is about the licensing of images, the reproduction market of
public domain works, which can affect museums and those who license
their images. It is dry reading, but if you are interested, read on.

A trade journal I receive (Art Business News) featured an article on
photographic copyrights. Specifically, a 2nd Circuit Court of New York
ruled that photos or transparencies of artworks no longer enjoy
copyright protection.

In short, Corel Corp. has issued a CD-ROM of digital reproductions of
well known paintings by European masters. The works were generally in
the public domain, however Bridgeman, a British licensing company
claimed to have exclusive copyright licensing rights in the photographic
transparencies of a number of the works found on the CD-ROM. They claim
that Corel must have used its transparencies, and therefore infringed on
its "new" copyrights which it claimed in the transparencies.

The court ruled that Bridgeman did not have copyright in its
transparencies. The Court reasoned: Underlying all copyright there must
be a certain degree of originality. Even though the originality
requirement is low, some protectable originality must exist. The Court
then stated, "the new reproduction of a work of art in a different
medium should not constitute the required originality."

The question regarding the copyrightability of photographs, the Courts
had this to say. "To be sure, much, perhaps almost all, photography is
sufficiently original to be subject to copyright. Certainly, anyone who
has seen any of the great pieces of photography...must acknowledge the
photographic image of actual people, places and events as creative and
deserving of protection as purely fanciful creations. But one need not
deny the creativity inherent in the art of photography to recognize that
a photograph which is no more than a copy of the work of another, as
exact as science and technology permits, lacks originality. This is not
to say such a feat is trivial, simply not original."

Those excerpts are from the January 1999 issue of Art Business News
Could be interesting if it ever goes to a higher Court.
--
R.Feuerriegel
88 syncro
Victoria BC