I think I see two possible misunderstandings in your original question. First, there is only one copyright here: the copyright in the photograph of the urn. (I am going to assume, like Amalyah, that the Greek urn itself is ancient and now in the public domain.) A medium resolution version is not a copyright derivative even though it may have been "derived" from a high-resolution original. It is just a copy. As the Copyright Office pamphlet on derivative works states: "To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a "new work" or must contain a substantial amount of new material." Furthermore, in order to have a copyright separate from the original photograph, it must possess, according to the Feist decision, "at least some minimal degree of creativity." So your medium-resolution version fails on both counts: it is not a derivative, and it does not embody any creativity of its own. You instead have two versions of one copyrighted work.
Now let's think about the CC license. The copyright statement for both versions would be the same: "(c) Museum Institution, 2014." The medium version's CC license would license the copyright and not any specific manifestation of that copyright. So the license that applies to the medium version would also apply to all other expressions of the copyrighted work - including the high-resolution version. And remember that the CC licenses prohibit you from imposing terms on the use of the copyrighted work that would prevent others from doing what the license allows. So if you licensed the medium resolution version as CC BY, you can't then impose other restrictions when you distribute a high-resolution version of it. (Or rather, you could impose those restrictions, but you would have no legal basis for objecting if someone ignores your terms.) It seems to me that if you want to impose different use restrictions on different resolutions, you are going to have to do that with contract terms that you devise and not a CC license. But there is some question whether contractual downstream use restrictions are legal. More importantly, you have to decide if you are willing to go to court to sue one of your customers/users. If not, it seems silly to try to impose the restriction in the first place. This, of course, is not legal advice and IANAL, just a simple archivist. Peter B. Hirtle, FSAA Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University & Senior Policy Advisor, Cornell University Library peter_hirtle at harvard.edu phirtle at cyber.law.harvard.edu peter.hirtle at cornell.edu t.? 607.592.0684 http://vivo.cornell.edu/individual/individual23436 Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/14142 > -----Original Message----- > From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf > Of Kate Blanch > Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2014 10:58 AM > To: 'mcn-l at mcn.edu' > Subject: [MCN-L] Different Copyrights / Different Image Resolutions > > Hello MCN, > This may be a rather dense question regarding copyright law...but as it's > outside my area of expertise I figured this community could provide a great > reference point. My own research is not turning up an good > answers/examples either! > > Do any institutions assign different copyright statements to derivatives of > the > same image, depending on that image's resolution? > > Take for example, a photo of a Greek urn in a museum collection. Would it be > common practice for a high-resolution TIFF of this photo to bear a > "(c)Museum Institution, 2014" statement, while a medium-resolution JPG of > the same photo would bear a "(c) Creative Commons License"? > > Does this scenario fit within basic copyright law or guidelines? > If anyone is differentiating copyright statements based on image resolution, > do you have this policy written/documented in a shareable way? > > Thanks for any feedback you might have! > > > Kate Blanch > Administrator, Museum Databases > kblanch at thewalters.org / 410.547.9000 ext. 266 > > The Walters Art Museum > 600 N. Charles Street, Baltimore MD 21201 > www.thewalters.org<http://www.thewalters.org/>
