Re: Copyright

[ruppen@kitagawa.qal.berkeley.edu (Andy Ruppenstein)]

Meredith (meth@delphi.com) writes concerning the t-shirt design:

>Seriously, though, does the copyright extend to any image of Kate? 

No, it doesn't. As the plans stands, swiping an image from off of
any of her albums to use on the t-shirt deal is copyright infringement.
This is because the images themselves are inherently copyrightable,
and the rights  to those particular images are no doubt held by 
either the photographer who took the photos, or Novercia, or EMI, 
or somebody. And to those who say that this t-shirt deal is a 
not-for-profit deal and therefore exempt from copyright law - that 
is irrelevant. Copyright isn't just about money - it's also about
protecting the  artist from having their works expropriated without
their consent. In practice, it may not matter much though,
because I doubt the owners of the copyright would care about a couple 
of dozen t-shirts. But still, it's not something to recommend
doing without the permission from the appropriate people.

As for copyright extending to any image of Kate? No, definitely
not. Any of us can take a pencil to paper and draw an image
of Kate and, voila! - you now have an image of her to which
_you_ own the copyright. (It's inherent, remember.) Meaning
you're then free to stick said image on a t-shirt. And hey,
if you're as bad as I am with a pencil, then you could use
a photograph of her which you (or someone else, with their
permission) took. That's it in a nutshell.

Of course, if you wanted to make it harder and see what
other laws you could run afoul of, use an image of her on the t-shirt
with a Budweiser beer can in hand and a cartoon balloon
with Kate saying, "Whenever I'm running up that hill, 
I drink Bud!" That is to say, there are laws against certain
uses of images, but the t-shirt project was not close
to breaking those. 

But really, it would do better for those doing the
t-shirt to come up with their own image to use. Certainly
on the Richard Thompson mailing list someone was able
to come up with a perfectly lovely design for their t-shirt,
and there's no reason why the lovehounds couldn't do the same.

Andy / ruppen@qal.berkeley.eud


[Standard disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, nor do I pretend to be.
Feel free to correct any of the above. I'm not responsible
for any actions, etc....]