Thanks for the comment. There are certainly a host of other issues about using historical materials online, too.

I wouldn’t expect your example of cleaning up or enhancing an image, by the way, to qualify it as a new image for copyright purposes. Courts have generally found these to be “slavish copies”, essentially duplicates of the original – not different enough to be derivative works entitled to copyright protection. You have to “warhol” an image before it’s distant enough to be new (and art), I guess.

I don’t understand the nuances of “ownership” as your Davis portrait example raises, either. Instinctively, I feel there’s something wrong with the NY Public Library requiring a fee to publish a copy of a picture (as above) from their collection which is in the public domain. I resent the constriction of historical information, but I recognize they have costs to recoup.

Which is heading for fair use. A topic I feel strongly about, but will save for another time …

Brian

I think your summary of copyright laws is right on the money, and the propriety of lifting images from other sites is often a question unrelated to copyright.

But there is a question of “ownership” and permissions. If a museum, for example, owns an original, pre-copyright portrait of Jefferson Davis, I could not simply reproduce it in a publication without permission. And in that case, “publishing” something online may be indistinguishable from conventional publishing. All that said, it’s easy to restrict oneself to images known to be in the public domain, including everything at U.S. government web sites.

There is such a thing as a new materials copyright, for example, when Bob Younger took an old tome, reset the type, added an intro and index, and possibly fixed typos, etc. One would have to quote the original text to avoid infringement. That might apply to otherwise public domain images on the internet, if the poster has scanned the image and enhanced it with software to make it more crisp, or to lend better contrast. In that case, it’s effectively a new work, but I don’t know how the law applies.

Where things really get gray is determining how much text constitutes “fair use.”

Good post.

Eric