Copyright: Its History and Its LawBowker, R. R. (Richard Rogers)
History
Copyright: Its History and Its Law
Bowker, R. R. (Richard Rogers)
Copyright -- History; Copyright -- United States -- History
Photographs, a modern development since the early copyright laws, were
first included with negatives in the American act of 1865, in respect to
which the action of Congress was upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court in
1884 in the decisive case of Burrow-Giles Lith. Co. _v._ Sarony, and in
the English fine arts copyright act of 1862. They are specifically named
(sec. 5, j) in the new American code, and are included specifically or
impliedly under copyright protection in most countries. The peculiar
circumstance that the skill of the photographic artist is not
necessarily shown in the composition of the picture taken, but more
usually in the selection of subject or point of view and treatment in
the process, leads to complexities as to authorship, ownership, etc. It
is unnecessary and indeed undesirable to copyright separately a
photograph of a copyrighted work, of which the general copyright is
comprehensive of all reproductions, but the original copyright notice
including the name of the artist must appear on each photograph or its
mount. An original photograph of an uncopyrighted or uncopyrightable
subject may be copyrighted as a photograph, as was held with respect to
natural scenery in 1903, in Cleland _v._ Thayer, in the U. S. Circuit
Court of Appeals, where a colored photograph of a Colorado pass was
protected. Where a photographer had posed a woman and a child
characteristically, Judge Wheeler in the U. S. Circuit Court in New York
held, in 1891, in Falk _v._ Brett Lith. Co., where defendant had merely
reversed the photograph in a lithographic reprint, that the photograph
was copyrightable and that the photographer was the author. And this
doctrine, that the posing and treatment of a photograph subject gave
justification for copyright, was also upheld in the case of a portrait
of an actress in the same year in Falk _v._ Gast by Judge Coxe. In the
English case of Bolton _v._ Aldin _et al._, in 1895, Justice Grantham in
the Queen's Bench Division held that the photograph of a tiger was
infringed by a drawing from the photograph published in the _Sketch_
magazine. But the copyrighting of a photograph of an uncopyrighted
subject cannot prevent the photographing of the same subject
independently by others, nor can the use of a "general idea" be
prevented. Under the new American code, the fee for registering a
photograph is but fifty cents, if a certificate is not desired, and the
new Copyright Office Rules hold that in moving picture films only one
registration is requisite, "the entire series being counted as a single
photograph."
{Sidenote: Tableaux vivants and moving pictures}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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