Personally, I would prefer that people pursue freedom of panorama before
we pursue "freedom of deep space objects". The later I would put pretty
far down the priority list, actually. How about the following agenda:
1. Freedom of orphaned works
2. Freedom of panorama in U.S.
3. Get Library of Congress to digitize all U.S. copyright records
4. Get U.S. to apply rule of the shorter term
5. Get U.K. to officially kill sweat of the brow
6. Repeal database rights in EU
7. Repeal Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act
8. Fix absurd copyright terms in Mexico
9. Get works by U.S. states added to public domain
10. Freedom of deep space objects
....
99. Profit
Ryan Kaldari
On 9/17/12 6:22 AM, John Vandenberg wrote:
Where is the onwiki discussion about this? I could find '[1]'
Or a wikipedia page that describes the copyright status of imagery of
DSOs?
John Vandenberg.
sent from Galaxy Note
On Sep 15, 2012 1:25 PM, "??????" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi,
I am not seeking legal advice. I am asking the pursuit of the
issue. I am
not a US citizen so I do not have a congress person to contact.
The laws
governing copyright can be amended to address the issue of deep space
objects (DSO). I do not expect a result next week, I merely want
the issue
to enter into an agenda of some sort. If the Foundation is going
to take
the lead, this probably would only be possible through a board
decision. In
such a case I want to work with people to come up with such a draft
proposal to the board.
I realize this is an unusual request but there seems to be a lack of
clarity on this issue[1]. Argument is that copyright can be an
issue since
not every organization observing or assisting NASA's observations are
PD-USgov compatible. We may be forced to permanently delete all
deep space
objects as a result.
I'd like to provide a short technical explanation why copyright
of deep
space objects or DSOs (objects outside of the solar system) are
meaningless. For ordinary photographs copyright is determined by
factors
such as lighting, perspective, exposure and other such settings that
creates a different image of the same object. You can distinguish the
difference between a daylight photo and an evening photo.
With deep space objects however, even the stellar parallax[2]
has a very
small value. The closest object outside of the solar system is
4.24 light
years (268,136 AU's) away. The semi-major axis of earth is about
1AUs. The
difference in perspective is like looking at a 2cm (width of a
nickel) wide
object 5.3km (3.29 miles) away and the perspective difference is
switching
left eye to the right eye. We lack scientific instruments to even
detect a
stellar parallax for objects much further. In other words our
perspective
of the nearest star and beyond is more or less constant and the
objects
themselves look the same for hundreds of years.
So any photo of a deep space object I or someone else takes from the
solar system will look identical regardless of when and where on
earth I
take it within multiple lifetimes. I think this can bring legal
precedent
for us to either disregard any copyright claim or at least pursue
lawmakers
in congress to amend the copyright law to make an exception in the
law.
People who worked with congress such as Neil Degrasse Tyson could be
consulted to this end. Also international treaties[3] can be
consulted to
this end as copyrighting photos of deep space objects could be
interpreted
as an unfair exploitation of resources.
I realize this reads like something out of Star Trek but this is
growing
to be quite a problem as we see more and more weird copyright
claims even
when dealing with NASA which traditionally had a PD-USgov
mentality. NASA
regularly contracts its more recent projects and to be fair we do
not know
how NASA contracts these projects which could potentially lead
to legitimate copyright claims in the future.
[1]:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Potential_deletion_of_all_deep_space_objects
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_law#International_treaties
-- ?????? (To Aru Shiroi Neko)
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