Duke profs almost made $2M off public domain images

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18 points·sbuccini··4 comments

This is a long article. The central suggestion is that there should be limitations on what people can do with content that enters the public domain.

I think some of the interesting aspects of this article can be exposed in a small hypothetical parable.

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Let us suppose that I go to an estate sale. I buy a box. Inside this box are 80 year old photo negatives from a well-known photographer. I scan these negatives, enlarge them, digitally correct some of the problems due to age, and then produce a photo book from a selection of these photos. The photos are old enough to be in public domain, so I sell my photo book and don't have to worry about sharing profits with descendents of the photographer. I make millions in profit.

In addition, other big fans of the photographer ask if they can have access to my scans of the photos. As they're in the public domain, is there a requirement to give others free access too?

IIRC there's existing case law in copyright law about the amount of creative work required to perform "transformative work" to an existing work. I figure that essentially, if you barely touched up the photos, you'd not have "transformed" the original work, and it would remain in the public domain, but if you performed sufficiently extensive restoration, it may count as a transformation.

(going off of memory here and a bit of speculation, hope I didn't misremember it)

Yeah these weird edge cases are fun to think about, but so much of the law is just about what's reasonable.

In the age of NFTs this makes for an interesting story. But I’m really unsympathetic to the claim that there is some kind of scandal going on here.

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