My $.02: A faithful reproduction is not original. Period. Ever. The limits and requirements of the medium in which the reproduction takes place does not change this. If one only has b&w film (or cannot afford to print a catalog in color), the fact that one uses b&w film for the reproduction does not change the unoriginal reproduction into a new creative or original work. Same is true for lithography, color photography, videography, digitizing, etc.
Can an original work be authored by changing medium from, say, oil paint to silk screen reproductions? Surely. And the same could be true for a photograph of a painting - or a series of photographs, or mdofications to photographs. The endless reworkings of Marilyn Monroe photos is a case in point, I think.
It is impossible to capture all of the color, intensity, detail of a
painting with even the finest color camera and film. In the first
place, you do not normally have a one-to-one correspondence of film
"pixels" to picture pixels. Even if you do have such a large piece of
film, no color film made today captures all of the colors available to
an oil painter (let alone to nature). But these limits to technology do
not suddenly make the most faithful reproduction a copyrightable work.
If one were doing a series of photographs to show the limits of the technology, to show the variability of cameras and films and lights and the like, then that might be an original work - because the aim is not purely faithful reproduction, but rather the aim is creation of an original work for some other purpose. But it could be the case that none of the reproductions standing alone is copyrightable although the set as a set could be - like the example someone else gave of famous phototgrapher's photographs of a work of art.
Like pretty much everything else in copyright law, the lines are not clear and the distinctions are not always fully defensible on the basis or strict logic or analogy. But there is a difference between a mere change of medium and an original work which adds value. Not all works derived from another work are themselves original. Some are just plain copies.
-- Steven D. Jamar Professor of Law Director, Legal Research & Writing Program Howard University School of Law 2900 Van Ness Street N.W. Washington, D.C. 20008 United States of America vox: 202-806-8017 fax: 202-806-8428 email: sjamar[_at_]law.howard.eduReceived on Fri Apr 09 1999 - 12:29:05 GMT
"Grub first: then ethics."
Bertolt Brecht, Threepenny Opera, act II, sc. 1
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Mar 26 2007 - 00:35:35 GMT