<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/17/italy-decides-that-leonardo-da-vincis-500-year-old-works-are-not-in-the-public-domain/>
"
Walled Culture is a big fan of the public domain. The amazing artistic uses
that people are able to make of material only once it enters the public domain
are an indication that copyright can act as an obstacle to wider creativity,
rather than something that automatically promotes it. But there’s a problem:
because the public domain is about making artistic productions available to
everyone for no cost and without restrictions, there are no well-funded
lobbyists who stand up and defend it. Instead, all we hear is whining from the
copyright world that the public domain exists, and calls for it to be
diminished or even abolished by extending copyright wherever possible.
Sometimes those attacks can come from surprising quarters. For example, in
October last year
Walled Culture wrote about Italy’s Uffizi Galleries suing
the French fashion house Jean Paul Gaultier for the allegedly unauthorized use
of images of Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece
The Birth of Venus on its
clothing products.
Sadly, this is not a one-off case. The
Communia blog has another example of
something that is unequivocally in the public domain and yet cannot be used for
any purpose, in this case a commercial one. The public domain art is the famous
Vitruvian Man drawn by Leonardo da Vinci over 500 years ago."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
