At 05:29 PM 1/27/2003 -0500, Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote:
>Ideas are also uncopyrightable. (There are eight categories that are not
>copyrightable.) If I visit your website and look at your different
>images, I will be able to copy the ideas that are embodied in the images
>and create my expressions based on the copied ideas.
How does one distinguish between an idea and an expression embodied within an image or work of art? It would seem that in art the idea and the expression of that idea are integral with one another and consequently inseparable.
This, incidentally speaks to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's majority opinion in Eldred v. Ashcroft. She says that copyright is immune from First Amendment challenges because copyright only protects expression, not ideas. This may be so in written work (don't ask a poet to concur), but it is outright wrong for visual works.
How does one communicate the "idea" of a painting without showing or illustrating the painting? "On a turbulent sea, the nighttime storm flashes lightening everywhere, and the sloop founders in the distance as the weary crew takes to the lifeboats." Perhaps that will evoke an image, but, certainly not the one about which I'm thinking.
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