Re: Fair Use Question?

On the questions of digitizations of photos being distributed over the net, I am largely in agreement with Glenn Tenney's comments on the subject. Photography is creative expression in a tangible medium, and hence, rightfully protected by copyright. On the other hand, the distribution of "excerpts" of these materials through the network can either bolster or hinder the interests of the copyright holder.

For example, low quality jpegs of a commercial artist's work could serve to promote interest in that artist's work. As such, museums might not find network distribution of digitized versions of their collections as antithetical to their financial missions, either as privately or publicly endowed.

I might suggest that quantification of lines of text or proportions of images which can be replicated without infringement might, in light of clever compression routines, be less useful as a metric than the degree of reconstructability of the original. A word co-occurrence frequency matrix or a 36K jpeg are likely insufficient to allow the restoration of the original Joyce's Ulysses or Picasso's Guernica.

This might put the mission of copyright law (simultaneous protection of public interest and private gain) on a similar footing with census law (requiring public disclosure of aggregate data, but the rigorous protection of individual data): summaries from which the specifics cannot be reconstructed should be allowable, provided the individual is in no way compromised. No doubt though, there are Godelian undecidables buried in the issues of algorithmic inversion such that a process deemed non-invertable at time X may be deemed invertable at time Y>X.

David Dailey
<david.p.dailey[_at_]williams.edu> Received on Wed Apr 13 1994 - 20:36:47 GMT