While watching this short BBC production on Lord Nelson and the Royal Navy, I was distracted by the notice on the screen: “All images subject to copyright - and courtesy National Maritime Museum.” Is that so? Can 200-year-old etchings still be under copyright?
Obviously, this is just one very specific example. I could have equally talked about the Louvre’s, or any other museum’s, similar copyright claims on the works it holds.
Can art that’s hundreds of years old be protected by copyright?
The museum doesn’t have a copyright on the postcards they sell in the gift shop, either, even though they like to claim that they do. They’re considered “slavish copies” of the original works, and thus are not original works and not copyrightable.
Interesting, looking up “slavish copy” (setting aside all the results on Ipads and Samsung) a photo of a out of copyright thing would count as a “slavish copy” as one would hope it is devoid of artistic or being changed in any way…so it maybe they are blowing smoke in claiming it at all. Why not ask them?
Photographic Reproductions, Copyright and the Slavish Copy by Terry S. Kogan :: SSRN is an abstract for a paper that argues that this policy is inappropriate. Too bad we can’t see the article, but I don’t need to read it: IMHO the act of photographing is significant; one person can do a far better (and therefore more valuable) job than another, yet his or her efforts are not protectable as IP.
I wonder if it applies in the audio realm as well. For things like music, there are two kinds of copyrights: Performing Arts ¶ and Sound Recording (SR, aka phonorecord). The former covers the abstract content; the latter covers only a specific recording. If you play a cover of a song without permission, you’d be infringing the PA but not SR. But what about a digital recording of an old wax recording? I’d have expected that to be covered as SR, but perhaps it’s not copyrightable as a “slavish copy”.
Worth noting that the Bridgeman doctrine may well apply in the US, but that doesn’t mean a UK court would find the same way. The US Supreme Court, in the 1991 Feist case, ruled that creativity is necessary for something to be the subject of copyright under US law, and that mere copying or straightforward arrangement of facts is insufficient.
“…The original work(s) are in the public domain; the copies the Library supplies are in copyright as they are new copies of the original materials. This is why you will need to clear permission…>”
Maybe i was right first time!
I do worry about this sort of thing, i use art works etc as inspiration/ copy…
The source quotes the British Library, who just might have a slight interest in claiming copyright. They can say whatever they want on their web page, but the law is the final authority.
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Under the law, a photo of a public domain work does not have copyright. Barring some sort of exemption in the law, the British Library does not own the copyright on photos of public domain works.
Now, nothing stops them from claiming it, and asking for fees. It’s cheaper to pay the fees than to be sued, even if you win. But I doubt they charge enough to make it worth your while to hire a lawyer.
One might be able to argue that a photograph of a statue could be an original work: You’re trying to get it from just the right angle, and under just the right lighting conditions, and so on. You could have two different photographs of the same statue, both very good photographs, which look completely different. But it’s different for a two-dimensional original. Yes, two people might take different photographs of the Mona Lisa, and the one taken by the more skilled photographer will be superior, but in this case, the measure of “superior” is generally going to be “more faithful reproduction of the original”. If two skilled photographers both endeavor to take the most faithful picture they can of the Mona Lisa, their resulting works are going to look almost identical to each other. This is what a slavish copy is.
True, but the UK’s definition seems different than the US’s. A photograph could definitely be the result of skill, labour and judgement. I omitted the term “original” there, which might swing the scales the other way, though.
In any case, if you’re in the US, it’s the US law (and the US copyright) that applies, not the UK law and UK copyright. If the copyright is not registered in the US, it still exists implicitly, according to current US law.
Rather selective reading there. You’re ignoring the clauses Provided it is significantly different to the original work and minor alterations that do not substantially alter the original would not qualify.
Simply taking a representational photograph of a work of art seems specifically ruled out.
Interesting. What would happen if you took a picture across a border? There’s a well-discussed legal hypothetical of standing in one country and shooting a gun across the border with intent to hit someone on that side, and which jurisdiction(s) would have jurisdiction to try you and whose substantive laws would apply to the act. E.g. if it is a copyright violation in the UK to make a slavish copy without permission, but you make that copy while standing in Maine and looking through a sufficiently powerful telescope pointed at an orbital mirror array, would that copy be legal in the US? Legal in the UK since it was made legally under US law? Has something like this ever happened? We might be able to accomplish this without the orbital mirrors if we set this in the Caribbean - your photographer is standing in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands (where US copyright law applies) and takes a picture through a telescope that is pointed at a painting hanging on a wall in Tortola, British Virgin Islands.
The country of first publication would, I believe, be the law controlling such a case. It matters not that you wrote a passage describing a temple in Tokyo while in Chinese airspace. If your travel guide is published in the US, that’s the law that controls what copyright you have.