Wikimedia Commons

Commons:Deletion requests/File:4X-AHC Martin Harrison.jpg

< Commons:Deletion requests
This deletion discussion is now closed. Please do not make any edits to this archive. You can read the deletion policy or ask a question at the Village pump. If the circumstances surrounding this file have changed in a notable manner, you may re-nominate this file or ask for it to be undeleted.

File:4X-AHC Martin Harrison.jpg

edit

The OTRS ticket does not cover the aircraft livery design, as confirmed by the OTRS volunteer. This is consequently a copyvio and should not have been approved. Fæ (talk) 18:17, 30 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]


This kind of thing can be hard. It is not de minimis, but probably rather "incidental". In the Ets-Hokins decision, the judge ruled that a photograph of a bottle would not be derivative of a copyrightable label, even if it appeared in the photo and was prominent (i.e. not de minimis). The point was to photograph the bottle (a utilitarian object), and the label did not qualify as the "underlying work" -- it was inherently there if you were going to photograph the bottle, which was the underlying work. It would take a photo focusing on the label for it to be derivative. There was a similar case (Latimer v. Roaring Toyz) of photographing a motorcycle with a copyrighted design painted on it; while the judge was able to decide on contractual grounds to avoid the copyright question, they strongly hinted at a similar ruling -- Further weakening defendant-appellees argument is the fact that the ZX-14 motorcycles were the subject matter and primary focus of Latimer's photographs. Latimer's photographs can best be described as being “based upon” the ZX-14 motorcycles, useful articles not subject to copyright protection. The fact that Hathaway's artwork appears in the photographs is merely incidental. Once you get to the point of covering the entire surface, and if the point of the photo was the livery, it does get fuzzier (and for stuff like product packaging, it probably crosses the line) -- but I normally prefer to actually have a court case backing up such deletions so we can show a real-life problem, and I'm not sure there are any for a situation like this (in fact, the court cases point the other direction). If this is a copyvio, then a photo of any plane with copyrightable livery should also be a copyvio. Clothing patterns are routinely copyrighted, but I'm not sure that makes a photo of someone wearing that clothing a derivative work (at least, I've not heard of any case along those lines). While I think this is closer to the line than some, I'm not sure there is a good enough reason to delete. The Pokemon Jet is probably a much more likely case to be a problem, though possibly more based on trademark than copyright. Carl Lindberg (talk) 01:23, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
With the same distorted logic of the above request, the next step should be to put a deletion request to the whole Retrojets category, or maybe delete all photos of any object carrying a livery? Assuming the livery is copyrighted.
BTW, why fish drawings are a copyvio and birds are not? Oyoyoy (talk) 05:38, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Copyright law can be very twisted... unless something like this actually comes up in court, it's hard to say for sure what the result would be. In many cases this type of thing can seem silly because people published photos of that type of thing all the time, but most non-commercial situations like this would also be covered under fair use. When you get to commercial use (selling a postcard of that photo for example), fair use gets a lot more constricted. Would the airline be able to sue someone making that postcard? I'm tending not (given my argument above) but it's not a crazy question to ask, honestly. You'd think taking photos of all the monuments in Washington DC would also be OK, but there are couple where it is not (and have been proven that way in court, when commercial use of photos happened). Carl Lindberg (talk) 20:51, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Carl. This case and the Pokémon example are worth adding to the DM casebook. They radically change our norms for DM, and it may be possible to overturn a large number of past deletions of decorated mass produced objects and packaging as "incidental". --Fæ (talk) 08:02, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
France had something like the "theory of the accessory" which is why we allow photos of the Louvre square which contain the pyramid (even when it's in the center), even though we disallow photos of just the pyramid. I'm not sure this changes a whole lot from what we have been doing. But decorations on useful articles is a different situation than a photo directly of a copyrighted work. Carl Lindberg (talk) 20:53, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
From a Wikimedia perspective, if decorations on useful articles is the objective, then we are covered by fair use where these are most likely to be used. Not that utilization ought to be a factor if our aim in this DR is to set a potential precedent for DM policy application. --Fæ (talk) 12:32, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Kept: as per Carl above, and other DRs on the same case. Yann (talk) 14:10, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Deletion_requests/File:4X-AHC_Martin_Harrison.jpg&oldid=165221918"