Re: Fair Use Question?

At 1:36 AM 4/7/94 -0400, Maryly Snow wrote:
>I agree that there is considerable skill and discernment necessary
>to photograph well a painting or a building. The crux of the issue
>is whether that skill is sufficient reason to keep such painting or
>building off the Internet and out of educator's hands. Don't
>Michelangelo's David and Leonardo's Mona Lisa "belong" to all of us
>at some level? Certainly, the person who took the best, or a very
>good photography needs to be compensated, but tracking these people
>down for educational purposed is not-cost-effective.

I remember a letter to the editor in the San Jose Mercury a few years ago where an educator said approximately 'the software is too expensive, so we have to buy just one package and copy it for all of our machines -- we couldn't afford to buy one copy for each machine." How is that different from what you said?

One solution is to "go out and take a snapshot." This is the essence of many CD-ROMs we're seeing more and more of that have royalty-free music, sound effects, clip art, and photographs. Someone has either licensed an existing photo, or went out and took a photo so that they could sell it without royalties.

Please, I too feel that pictures should be digitized and widely (and freely) available. I'm just having a difficult time resolving that feeling with copyirght rights. The picture I might want for a few hundred copies of our neighborhood association's newsletter does not have to be of the same high quality that I would demand for a fine arts book.

A museum has two needs to be satisfied. (1) They want reproductions to be faithful to the original (ie. high quality). And (2), they need the money. Together, this makes for a situation that works against getting photos digitized and widely available.

A note: Having produced a few fine art laser discs (including doing various parts of it), I can tell you that there IS a great deal of skill involved in the entire process -- from taking the photo to post production. In many cases, yes, photographing a painting can be as simple as placing it onto a copy stand and pressing a shutter release. But it can be much more than that. For example, in post production of fine art slides, you might have a few people involved tweaking the colors to get the final image to look "right" -- and believe me, that is an ART / SKILL. Is it enough to justify a new copyright? Hmmm... I don't know... it might be, legally, but I don't think it should.

> I still believe that low to moderate
>resolution files have no commercial value on the net and should
>therefore fall under the Section 102 protections. One of the issues
>in this discussion is the intellectual property question. Although
>it does take skill and discernment to make a good photograph, the
>bulk of the intellectual property resides in the original object,
>the David or Mona Lisa, and the strenght of that I.P. should be more
>important than the photographer who documented the object, which is,
>in the public domain.

But some news photographs are taken with even less art and skill applied than for a photo of the David. Some news photos (I said SOME, definitely not all!) are worth alot solely because the camera was there and the shutter was pressed.

Even low or moderate resolution photos can have great value (at least in the area of news). Seeing a low-res photo on my desktop computer a few seconds after a breaking story might be worth more than a high quality photo on the cover of a magazine a month later.

---
Glenn Tenney
tenney[_at_]netcom.com   Amateur radio: AA6ER
(415) 574-3420      Fax: (415) 574-0546