Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/06/16
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]In a message dated 6/15/01 7:47:16 PM Eastern Daylight Time, schroter@optonline.net writes: << Replace photograph (sculpture) with automobile. > > An automobile is a tool, not an embodiment of a purely creative work, and as > such, copyright usually is not asserted or enforced for automobiles (although, > in theory, the designer of the automobile has a copyright on the design). >> An automobile is indeed a tool. But while it is not an embodiment of a creative work, t it is also a creative work. Ferrari has gone to court several times to enforce its ownership rights in the design of more than one highly prized Ferrari-Pininfarina design and to prevent fabricators from producing quite exact copies of real Ferrari automobiles (which some fabricators have done). And Ferrari has won. Usually these creations are called <replicas>. But in one celebrated case, a fellow in Europe produced several exact copies of a Ferrari 250 GTO, a sports racer from the early 1960s that 12 years ago were being auctioned for upwards of $10,000,000!!! This guy was putting real factory serial numbers on his replicas and selling them as true, original factory Ferraris. He went out of business and into jail. On this whole subject, it seems to me that professional photographers should be a great deal less concerned about the remote possibility that someone may assert intellectual property rights inhibiting their access and freedom to photograph commercially someone else's creation than they are about protecting their own rights to their creative work product and their ability to pursue other who reproduce their work without compensation. Just a Saturday thought while watching les 24 Heures du Mans. Seth LaK 9