Quote:
Originally Posted by neilmarr
A legally taken photograph is the copyright of the photographer, Jellby, unless rights have been specifically assigned elsewhere. I couldn't, for instance, reproduce a picture postcard image of, say, Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower as the whole or part of cover art without the necessary permissions from whoever holds rights to the picture itself. Cheers. Neil
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The issue in this case was that the NPG had spent a great deal of money digitizing their collection, and license the image rights as a way of funding the gallery. UK copyright law (and I believe that in the rest of the EU, too) has a so-called "sweat of the brow" clause, granting copyright in cases where considerable work has gone into producing a reproduction, even of a public domain image. Apparently US copyright law does not have such a clause, and Wikipedia claimed that they were within their rights to reproduce these images. For more details, see
here.
I'm pretty sure, however, that this would not apply to scanned magazine images, since little effort or expense would be expended in producing them.