His story of the “orchestra” where everyone went at their own speed reminded me of a performance I once witnessed where a group of musicians who didn’t know one another got together over a weekend to perform a piece with a “guest conductor”. Apparently they recognised quickly that the guest conductor was clueless, and at the performance everyone took their lead from the first violin. It was amusing to watch the conductor frantically waving sometimes as much as a beat out. Ever since it has stuck with me as a metaphor for how society manages to function despite the people who think they run it. Copyright law is a good example; if everybody tried to follow it all the time practically nothing would get published, but because most of the time most people involved are sensible, the system kind of works. When, as in the Apple/Samsung cases, big egos with big dollars get involved, there is an almighty car crash. Usually I end up hoping that both sides lose.
[edit - I saw this in the Cipolla piece you cited:
"and left behind a bunch of (half-american) offsprings… who promptly tried to scrap money out of everything he had written, even if -as in the case of this small text- clearly earmarked and STATED by the Author in its 1986 version as intended for the public domain "
As Schiller so rightly said, Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.]
Wouldn’t that prevent the tattoo artist from using that design ever again? How many people get genuinely unique tattoos, rather than one picked out of a sample book?
[quote=“SheiffFatman, post:44, topic:73170”]
Wouldn’t that prevent the tattoo artist from using that design ever again? [/quote]
No necessarily. The tattoo artist could assign a perpetual, non-exclusive world wide license to the person getting the tattoo, or license the design back from them, or any of a number of different ways of legally allowing them both to use it, including Public Domain assignment via CC0. However, that would require the tattoo to be original, PD, or licensed with needed rights from a flash book company or whatnot.
Of course one COULD argue that since he has more than one tattoo it was a “contribution to a collective work,” and therefore eligible to be a WMFH. Really no more absurd that the attempts of record companies to do this.
I would think that “specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work” - said work being the public persona or brand of that athlete - would be a reasonable argument.
But - this is why copyright is basically broken when brought into the digital age. The intent was to allow a given work to profit it’s creator for a limited time; unless that tattoo artist is reproducing that specific tattoo on others for profit, copyright shouldn’t even apply; that tattoo on a video game character is clearly a derivative, transformative work. Or not - the rules are so hopelessly vague and inappropriate to the digital realm that they arguably cause more harm than good today.
