Re: Line art (was Google Print vs. The Open Library vs. Project ...)
PS-- If that bird guy has any line art to send me, he should send it to someone else to have it forwarded to me. For some reason his mail isn't reaching me anymore. And please--everybody--document! Source, bibliographic data, date, author, illustrator if available! Get it as close to 510 X 680 pixels as you can, in .jpg, .gif, or .bmp. I'm not set up to deal with any other format. If it's not documented I'm not going to give it to anybody to post and I'm not going to use it myself. Stuff you BOUGHT from Dover is okay. Dover, to the best of my knowledge, does nothing that is not out of copyright. Anne
On 11/24/05, Gutenberg9443@aol.com <Gutenberg9443@aol.com> wrote:
Stuff you BOUGHT from Dover is okay. Dover, to the best of my knowledge, does nothing that is not out of copyright.
That's not true. Much of Dover's material is original, reprints of material still under copyright, or reworking of public domain material until the copyrighted material is hard to seperate from the public domain (the clip art books are a good example of this; they have a compilation copyright, and I suspect they've done enough cropping and cleaning on the art to claim a copyright on the pieces in many cases).
On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, David Starner wrote:
On 11/24/05, Gutenberg9443@aol.com <Gutenberg9443@aol.com> wrote:
Stuff you BOUGHT from Dover is okay. Dover, to the best of my knowledge, does nothing that is not out of copyright.
That's not true. Much of Dover's material is original, reprints of material still under copyright, or reworking of public domain material until the copyrighted material is hard to seperate from the public domain (the clip art books are a good example of this; they have a compilation copyright, and I suspect they've done enough cropping and cleaning on the art to claim a copyright on the pieces in many cases).
Dover is very good about not claiming copyright for most of their books, so I would simply bypass Mr. Starner's blatant "That's not true," for an opportunity to ask them yourself. * As for doing "enough cropping and cleaning on the art to claim a copyright on the pieces in many cases," The U.S. courts ruled that any attempt to accurately depict public domain works remains in the public domain. "The point of the exercise was to reproduce the underlying works with absolute fidelity. Copyright is not available in these circumstances." To read the complete court decision: See Bridgeman Art Library v Corel Corp 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999) This decision demonstrated that the efforts of museum curators, etc., to monopolize the reproduction of posters, books, postcards, et. al., of public domain paintings, lithographs, drawings, and two dimensional artwork in general were NOT supported by copyright law, and there was no intellectual input into the content, merely accurate reproduction. As for compilation copyright, one could copyright nearly any collected works project, even if the works were all in the public domain, if one could prove intellectual input into the selection process. However, a complete works cannot be copyrighted, as such, but would need addition in other areas to be copyrightable. I don't know if Mr. Starner resides in the U.S., so I don't know if these are the laws that would apply in his specific instance. Michael
On 11/25/05, Michael Hart <hart@pglaf.org> wrote:
Dover is very good about not claiming copyright for most of their books, so I would simply bypass Mr. Starner's blatant "That's not true," for an opportunity to ask them yourself.
That's completely non sequitor. It is not true that all of Dover's books are out of copyright; I don't even know that most of their books are, given the number of compilation copyrights and outright new material they have.
As for doing "enough cropping and cleaning on the art to claim a copyright on the pieces in many cases," The U.S. courts ruled that any attempt to accurately depict public domain works remains in the public domain.
Any attempt to _accurately depict_ a public domain work is in the public domain. But creatively using a public domain work to produce a new work does give you a copyright. If you take a public domain work, and you selectively cut out pieces of the picture, you get a new copyright. If you want to argue that simply trimming away the image away from the main subject wouldn't get a new copyright, that's arguable, but certainly not covered by Bridgeman Art Library v Corel.
participants (3)
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David Starner -
Gutenberg9443＠aol.com -
Michael Hart