12-18-2010, 07:28 PM
To quote the grandfather in the last scene, the one in the kitchen in the movie "Moonstruck" ...
It's O.K. to include in your post, on a forum such as this, a link to a photo that is a reference you are using, either to build a model or to make a point ...
... but it's not O.K. to include in your post, on a forum such as this, a link that goes and gets the photo and makes it appear here.
I mean, I took a course in college on Intellectual Property, Patent and Copyright Law (a required course for Industrial Design seniors.) I guess the thing I don't understand is that nothing is being sold here, mostly the images that are posted here, if not of one's own work (which one would assume had been taken by the poster/builder) are usually posted for reference purposes. In my understanding of the laws, posting an image, and giving credit where credit is due is not unlike quoting someone's speech or referring to their written word in a scholarly paper and giving credit reference with footnotes or in a bibliography.
Am I so far off base here? In many cases, tracking down a photographer, some of whom may be deceased (in the case of vintage photos) may be difficult to impossible to do. And there's no telling how long it might take to find them! As far as I can tell, if you were going to use an image captured by someone other than yourself in a work that work that would be published and offered for sale, by all means, in that instance you would need permission ("published by permission" it always says) to use it. But simply using an image as a reference when conversing amongst friends is not a copyright infringement situation (as far as I know.) With the end result (possibly) a scale model, the image is being used as you would an image from a book that several of us are looking at while sitting around a table in a model railroad club discussing the building of a fleet of a particular type of freight car. The only difference is that we are discussing the topic and "looking at the photo" using the Internet as our lunch table and this forum as our virtual model railroad club.
Does that make any sense to anyone?
... I'm so confused!
It's O.K. to include in your post, on a forum such as this, a link to a photo that is a reference you are using, either to build a model or to make a point ...
... but it's not O.K. to include in your post, on a forum such as this, a link that goes and gets the photo and makes it appear here.
I mean, I took a course in college on Intellectual Property, Patent and Copyright Law (a required course for Industrial Design seniors.) I guess the thing I don't understand is that nothing is being sold here, mostly the images that are posted here, if not of one's own work (which one would assume had been taken by the poster/builder) are usually posted for reference purposes. In my understanding of the laws, posting an image, and giving credit where credit is due is not unlike quoting someone's speech or referring to their written word in a scholarly paper and giving credit reference with footnotes or in a bibliography.
Am I so far off base here? In many cases, tracking down a photographer, some of whom may be deceased (in the case of vintage photos) may be difficult to impossible to do. And there's no telling how long it might take to find them! As far as I can tell, if you were going to use an image captured by someone other than yourself in a work that work that would be published and offered for sale, by all means, in that instance you would need permission ("published by permission" it always says) to use it. But simply using an image as a reference when conversing amongst friends is not a copyright infringement situation (as far as I know.) With the end result (possibly) a scale model, the image is being used as you would an image from a book that several of us are looking at while sitting around a table in a model railroad club discussing the building of a fleet of a particular type of freight car. The only difference is that we are discussing the topic and "looking at the photo" using the Internet as our lunch table and this forum as our virtual model railroad club.
Does that make any sense to anyone?
biL
Lehigh Susquehanna & WesternÂ
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." ~~Abraham Lincoln
Lehigh Susquehanna & WesternÂ
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." ~~Abraham Lincoln