Re: The Battle of the Browsers

TaliesinSoft wrote:

> To my knowledge there are no copyright issues here. Given that I am not
using 
> the pictures for financial gain they should be in accordance with the
"fair 
> use" policies of copyright.

Sorry to be the barer of bad news, but your usage (if we are still
talking about your Ansel Adams site; I haven't been following the whole
thread) does not, in my inexpert opinion, come under fair use.  People
try to sneak so much in under the term "fair use" that it's no wonder
that certain nasty publisher's associations want to get rid of it all
together.

Also, it doesn't matter whether you are doing it for financial gain.
Suppose that I took the top fiction book from the New York Times best
seller list (seems to be something called "Cross" by James Patterson at
the moment) and printed my own copies and distributed them for free (or
at most at cost).  I wouldn't be doing it for financial gain, but I
would still be in violation of the copyright.

Now you may very well argue that your site promotes interest in Ansel
Adams and so is a good thing for the copyright holders.  I think you
could make a very good case along those lines.  Unfortunately, even if
you do make a persuasive case like that, it still isn't up to you to
decide what is good for the owner of the copyrights.  It's the copyright
owner who gets to decide that.

Copyrights for different Adams images are held by different people with
different policies and practice.  I think that the largest collection
still belongs to the University of California (used to be physically at
UC Santa Cruz, where I was a student; now at the UC Riverside, where my
wife was recently faculty, Museum of Photography).  Their policy can be
found at

  http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/mainFrame/collections/col_topic_lic_01.htm

But I don't which, if any, of your images come from that collection.

Now chances are you can continue with your website and nobody is going
to bother about the copyright issues.  Quite simply the quality of the
images that you have don't compete with the real thing (or high quality
reproductions), so I doubt any copyright holder is going to notice or be
bothered by your site.  But just because you can probably get away with
it doesn't make it legal.  As to whether it is right or not, I'll keep
my mouth shut because I don't think that anything can be added to that
discussion which hasn't been said far too many times before.

Cheers,

-j

-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                     http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
 I rarely read top-posted, over-quoted or HTML posts
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