Digital BW, The Print

Back when I was a lowly grad student at Hopkins in the early 70's the 
grad students and faculty would simply send order (with a charge number) 
over an order to the library to copy pages x to y in journal or book z. 
The library had a facility to copy and the copies showed up in the 
department mail boxes the next day.

In about '72 that all changed. The lawyers thought the school might be 
in violation of copyright laws because of this practice so if a person 
wanted something copied they had to go do it themselves. The lawyers 
stated that the school had no control over what was copied if someone 
put a nickel in the copy machine. The faculty did at least get copy 
machines that took plug in counters that could be used for charging put 
in the library.

The conundrum was most faculty and graduate students were on grants or 
contracts from various US Government agencies (NSF, Army, Air Force, 
Navy, NASA, etc.). In these grants and contracts it stipulated that 
funds could be used for the purpose of copying material to support the 
research. These clauses didn't seem to phase the legal beagles who 
argued that just because the US Government says you can do something 
doesn't mean that they really mean it. Sounds like asking the IRS a tax 
question - just because we tell you a deduction is legal doesn't mean it 
is.

More recently I've been in the middle of a case where a aerospace 
company filed a patent for a signal processing system and filed for 
copyright for the software implementing the algorithms. Trouble is the 
system was developed totally under US Government contract based on 
algorithms I developed ( and supplied to the contractor for 
implementation) - again under Government contract so all rights belong 
to the US Government by law. According to the Justice department lawyer 
handling the case ( for whom I have also been consulting for the past 
two year on the particulars of the system and algorithms ) is the 
copyright laws and patent law as they now read are so confusing as to be 
virtually useless. Ninety years ago a physicist would have been laughed 
out of town if he tried to patent the electron - but today patents are 
issues for DNA sequences. That I think is being revisited, but the very 
fact that there is justification for issuing a patent on something that 
exist in nature shows the sad state of affairs in the patent/copyright 
laws as they read today.

This has little to do with the issues associated with the appropriate 
use and/or misuse of images except that the same confusion still exist. 
Why is it perfectly "legal" to use someone's image in collage but not 
"legal" to download a low res version off the internet, print it and 
hang it in their kitchen? I don't think anyone has any interest in 
impacting someone's ability making money from selling their images and 
have that protected under copyright laws, but the current laws don't 
seem to serve anyone be it the public or the individual.

Hopefully congress will relook at both the patent and copyright laws and 
clarify them, but in the mean time as long as this particular aerospace 
company insists that the patent and copyrights they have from stealing 
work paid for by the American tax payer are legitimate, then I guess I 
will have a good source of income from consulting to Justice.

Truman

Jerry Olson wrote:

> Old time photographs are usually thought of as those taken about a
> generation ago, or earlier. Until fairly recently, a copyright only
> lasted 28 years.  Our legal person at the university tried long and hard
> to get an exact definition of what was and wasn't legal, and could never
> get anyone anywhere to commit to an exact answer. Sort of like the tax
> code. The congress writes it but hasn't a clue as to what's in it. Not
> even a tax lawyer knows everything in there! The best answer he could
> come up with is, you can shoot pictures out of books, both old and new,
> and old photographs or paintings for educational use and slide shows in
> lectures, etc. You cannot shoot photographs of all the pictures in the
> book. But he couldn't say how many pictures you could shoot. You also
> cannot sell any of these pictures, of course.
>
> Jerry
>
>