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>Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded. Rights to a photography done in 1851? Come on!
by DeathArrow 3y ago
>Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
Rights to a photography done in 1851? Come on!
- nicoco 3y agoEnough with your pirate propaganda! How do you expect dead artists to pay the bills? You filthy utopian anarchist!
- eru 3y agoYou are joking, but death is not really a moral obstacle here: The artist pays the bills by selling the (commercial) rights to their work. Those rights will be more valuable, if they last longer. That calculation is independent of the vagaries of the artist's longevity. (And in fact, it might make more sense to give rights a flat x years since creation, instead of tying it to whether the artist eats her vegetables and exercises.)
- amelius 3y agoThat's not how copyright was intended to work.
- vitus 3y agoEither way, this point is moot, as any copyrighted material from mid-19th century France entered the public domain long ago. In this case, Baldus died in 1889, so any of his works would have entered the public domain in 1939, in accordance with French law at the time -- the Literary and Artistic Property Act of 1793 established a copyright term of lifetime + 10 years, which was then extended to 50 years by the Literary and Artistic Property Act of 1866. The next extension to lifetime + 70 for general works* in 1992 came well beyond the point Baldus's work would have entered the public domain. * Copyright term was previously extended in the 1950s to lifetime + 70 years specifically for musical compositions.
- eru 3y agoMost laws came about by some messy political process. Do you really want to know how the sausage was made?
- Kiro 3y agoThat just makes it worse.
- eru 3y agoHow so?
- cassepipe 3y agoInteresting, I had never thought about it that way thank you
- wodenokoto 3y agoI think someone has the copyright to the scan, or something.
- bdowling 3y agoWhether you have a copyright to a scan of a copyright-ineligible work isn’t a question that has been tested in court, as far as I know. A copyright-ineligible work, however, can sometimes be protected by contract. Here, the restriction on the web page may be because the web site agreed with the scanning entity not to distribute a high-resolution version online.
- bdowling 3y agoFor the record, my guess is that there is no copyright in a scan of a copyright-ineligible work, because a scan is not a work of “authorship”. Unlike a photograph, which requires various authorial choices that reflect the photographer’s expressive intent, a scan is a mechanical and often completely automatic process.