{"id":4323,"date":"2016-04-02T14:32:49","date_gmt":"2016-04-02T20:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=4323"},"modified":"2016-04-02T14:49:14","modified_gmt":"2016-04-02T20:49:14","slug":"reuse-of-photos-of-public-domain-paintings-and-of-wire-frame-models","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/reuse-of-photos-of-public-domain-paintings-and-of-wire-frame-models\/","title":{"rendered":"Reuse of photos of public domain paintings, and of wire-frame models"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s rainy out, and I’m trying to avoid coding for Mineways<\/a> and collecting code for JGT<\/a>, so time to blog a little.<\/p>\n

Some years ago<\/a> I read\u00a0the book The Public Domain<\/a><\/em> about copyright and learned an interesting tidbit: photos of public domain paintings or photos are not covered by copyright in the U.S., they’re free to reuse.<\/p>\n

Here’s the relevant bit from Wikipedia<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Reproductions of public domain works<\/h4>\n

The requirement of originality was also invoked in the 1999\u00a0United States District Court<\/a>\u00a0case\u00a0Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.<\/a><\/i>\u00a0In the case,\u00a0Bridgeman Art Library<\/a>\u00a0questioned the\u00a0Corel Corporation<\/a>‘s rights to redistribute their high quality reproductions of old paintings that had already fallen into the\u00a0public domain<\/a>\u00a0due to age, claiming that it infringed on their copyrights. The court ruled that exact or “slavish” reproductions of\u00a0two-dimensional<\/a>\u00a0works such as\u00a0paintings<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0photographs<\/a>\u00a0that were already in the public domain could not be considered original enough for protection under U.S. law, “a photograph which is no more than a copy of a work of another as exact as science and technology permits lacks originality. That is not to say that such a feat is trivial, simply not original”.[30]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Another court case related to threshold of originality was the 2008 case\u00a0Meshwerks v. Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A.<\/i>\u00a0In this case, the court ruled that\u00a0wire-frame computer models<\/a>\u00a0of Toyota vehicles were not entitled to additional copyright protection since the purpose of the models was to faithfully represent the original objects without any creative additions.[31]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The wire-frame case is obviously relevant to computer graphics.\u00a0There’s\u00a0a rundown of other countries’ laws<\/a> on Wikimedia Commons’ site.<\/p>\n

Private collections are within their rights to limit access as they wish, as misguided as I think it is to sell public domain works to the public. I have a problem with any public institution invoking protection of photos of works, since there’s no legal basis for this.<\/p>\n

The Public Domain<\/em> is free to download<\/a>\u00a0and worth a read. To be honest, after a bit I skimmed chapter 2, but I particularly enjoyed\u00a0chapter 7<\/a>, a case study in which\u00a0the U.S.’s more permissive rules on what is in the public domain (“sweat of the brow” works are not copyright in the U.S.) are contrasted with Europe’s more restrictive laws.<\/p>\n

Oh, and if you like to read about copyright (you weirdo), you might enjoy The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on t<\/a>he<\/a> Internet<\/a><\/em>. The second half is worthwhile, though quite sad, and a story I\u00a0suspect many of us know\u00a0to some extent. The first half is about the evolution of copyright laws in the United States, which went from being a haven for piracy of foreign (primarily English) works to an ardent defender of extending copyright almost into perpetuity (despite there being no incentive benefits\u00a0in extending copyright retroactively, since the law at the time the work was created was found sufficiently appealing to the original author; sorry, I feel a rant coming on…). Ahhh, imagine this alternate universe<\/a>. <– That’s a great link, by the way, well worth a click.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s rainy out, and I’m trying to avoid coding for Mineways and collecting code for JGT, so time to blog a little. Some years ago I read\u00a0the book The Public Domain about copyright and learned an interesting tidbit: photos of public domain paintings or photos are not covered by copyright in the U.S., they’re free […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[270,603],"class_list":["post-4323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reports","tag-copyright","tag-public-domain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4323"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4329,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4323\/revisions\/4329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}