First and foremost, I am not a lawyer (IANAL). Secondly, it might be useful in discussing legal opinions to cite relevant case law. The most important case for US copyright law is 'Feist v. Rural', which was decided by the Supreme Court, and held that a minimum level of creativity was required for something to be copyrightable (in that case, an alphabetical telephone directory was not copyrightable). Subsequent cases have relied on this interpretation of Feist. An extremely important case in 1999 is the 'Bridgeman v. Corel' in which a District Court held that photo-realistic prints of public domain paintings were not copyrightable. To find the general facts of the case check Google or Wikipedia. Here is an interesting interpretation from one article (there are all sorts on the internet):
http://www.panix.com/~squigle/rarin/corel2.html This only appies to copyright in the USA. Are there other cases which would have a bearing on copyrightability of photographic reproductions of public domain sources? Rafael Ornes Manager, CPDL [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cpdl.org _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
