Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-ses!hpcc01!hpwrce!howeird
From: howeird@hpwrce.HP.COM (Howard Stateman)
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: Copyright Free or not?
Message-ID: <7650005@hpwrce.HP.COM>
Date: 29 May 89 16:51:08 GMT
References: <5829@microsoft.UUCP>
Organization: Ye Olde Salt Mines
Lines: 48

>philba@microsoft.UUCP (Phil Barrett) writes:
>I'm been curious about the following issue for some time now and
>haven't gotten a good answer.  There are a number of so called
>`Copyright Free' collections of clipart.  Dover publishes quite a
>[stuff about the restrictions the publisher has placed on copying these}
>Now, the illustrations were originally published in late nineteen hundreds
>and thus the orriginal copyright has expired.  So my question is: How can they
>enforce this?

If the individual clip art is in the public domain, than your use of
it is unrestricted. Even if the publisher had put together a book
of copyrighted clips, which he sold to you with the intention that
you would use them in your publications, then your use is unrestricted.
It comes under the "industrial use" section of the copyright law, which
was designed to protect publishers from such foolishness as the
restrictions which Dover put on its Copyright Free book. 

The collection itself is copyrighted, which means they could sue you if
you were to take the book and put your name on it, and re-publish it.
However, if all the art is truly in the public domain, you could use
it (ALL of it) in your own clip art catalog if you added significant
value to it. For example, if you re-arranged the chapters, added a
comprehensive index, added a hundred of your own clips, etc. Of course
since this is a subjective decision on the part of a judge (what constitutes
"significant value") you are probably best advised to steer clear of
doing this sort of thing without showing it to a copyright lawyer.

An example which may help you. I wrote an article on the ITC Zapf Dingbats (R)
font, which is a series of Postscript codes to generate a variety of
graphic characters instead of letters of the alphabet. The characters
were copyrightable, if not copyrighted, since they were designed by
ITC. However, when I contacted HP's corporate legal department to ask
how to get permission to reporduce the entire font set in my article,
I was told that since the font was sold to me with the intention that I
use it, it was covered by the "industrial use" clause, and no permissions
were needed. I did, however, have to note in my article that the name of 
the font was a registered trademark of ITC. Only the name, not the font.

hope this helps. 


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|Howard Stateman, Hewlett-Packard Response Center, Mountain View, CA |
|howeird@hpwrce.HP.COM      or     hplabs!hpwrce!howeird             |
|Disclaimer: I couldn't possibly speak for HP. I know too much.      |
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