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.
ReplyDeleteI've generally been careful with attribution when I share images on my videos. But this has always been an interesting question for me.
ReplyDeleteFrom the quote above, it seems like the judge doesn't consider non-artistic images as copyrightable.
"Uncreative copies of public domain works aren't copyrightable" has been the rule in the US since Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. in 1999.
ReplyDeleteWhat if the manuscript in question technically isn't "public domain"? Are the manuscripts from the British Library for instance "public domain", or are the digital images produced of a manuscript copyrighted by the institution/person who took them? Personally I think all manuscripts that are copies of ancient works should be considered public domain, and digital images taken of said manuscripts should always be free from any sort of copyright, or at least released under one of the Creative Commons licences, namely Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International : https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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