The other day I attended an interesting professional development session on "Foundations of Copyright for Researchers" (by the way, this was not punishment for using academia.edu). One of the interesting things about this was a discussion about a recent UK court case and its implications for copyright of digital images - something many of us are interested in and use pretty much every day.
In brief it seems that the Judge in this court case (Lord Justice Arnold) broadly ruled that simply taking a photograph of an object was not sufficiently "creative" to warrant the copyrighting of the digital image.
"What is required is that the author was able to express their creative abilities in the production of the work by making free and creative choices so as to stamp the work created with their personal touch […] This criterion is not satisfied where the content of the work is dictated by technical considerations, rules or other constraints which leave no room for creative freedom.”
If you are interested in this, then there is more information here: https://douglasmccarthy.com/2024/01/after-thj-v-sheridan/ (and also further reading and references to follow up).
Would that suggest that only MSI images of manuscripts would fall under copyright? In those cases the image has been altered from the original. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding.
ReplyDeleteAs academics, perhaps we should cite our sources of where we get the images, but the photos would not be copyrighted. I hope this does not lead to less sharing and public access to images of mss.
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