Use of public domain art revisited - Bridgeman vs. Corel

[kenjib]

There was a thread on using public domain artwork almost a year ago:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10121&highlight=paitings+durer

I have found some more information on this (a google search will turn up many other sources) from:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/humanitech/copyright/laws.html

Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. (a triumph for fair use of images)

The case was instituted by The Bridgeman Art Library (Bridgeman), an English company in the business of marketing transparencies of public domain works of art owned by museums and collectors as well as distributing its images as transparencies and as digital files on CD-ROM. The defendant, Corel, was a Canadian corporation which marketed a CD-ROM containing seven hundred digital reproductions of well known paintings by European masters, including 120 images of which Bridgeman claimed it controlled the only authorized reproductions. Bridgeman sued Corel and lost the case. The District Court held that substantially exact photographic reproductions of works of art are not independently copyrightable, because they lack the component of originality required under the copyright laws of both the United States and the United Kingdom. Consequently, the Court determined that any unauthorized use of those reproductions would not violate the laws of copyright.

I'm not necessarily advising anyone to do this, as I am not qualified to interpret the law, but it seems like you could check out nice fat art books from the library, scan artwork in, and use it in your publications so long as the artwork was published in some form prior to 1923.  Does anyone know anything about this?

Imagine:

"The Garden of Earthly Delights
A Roleplaying Game Inspired by the Works of Heironymous Bosch"

[jdagna]

Two things that come to my mind...

First of all, if the plaintiff in this case came after any of us, they would win - not because they were right, but because we couldn't afford our own defense.  Corel may even have been able to recoup their legal costs, but they had to be able to front the money to fight the case.

Secondly, I don't think it's as simple as using anything printed before 1923.  I know that I wouldn't be comfortable reproducing anything without either a lawyer's advice or a clear license agreement (such as you might find with many clip art collections).

[Veritas Games]

If the book is outside of copyright then you can reproduce it.  Period.

Now, if you are trying to reproduce an old image out of a new book then things get tricky.  Say you have a piece of art from the 1800s reproduced in a 2005 copyright book.  Hmmm...  Well, "slavish" reproductions are not entitled to copyrights if the original image is not copyrighted any more.  However, if some modicum of color adjustment, lighting, etc. was added to the original then there may be some copyrightability to that image.

So stick to old editions produced so long ago that they are out of copyright.  If you are certain something was published long enough ago then you don't need to seek a lawyer's advice.  Keep in mind that copyright law has changed over time and works had different lengths of copyright protection depending on the time period in U.S. law under which they were published.

Here's a link to info on this subject:
http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/training/Hirtle_Public_Domain.htm

You don't need to seek a lawyer's advice for everything in life.  Stick to really old stuff (as determined by the above link) and have a field day.

Lee