Case Bridgeman Art Library Ltd. v. Corel Corporation
The case of Bridgeman Art Library Ltd. v. Corel Corporation, 36 F.Supp.2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999) was a proceeding decided by the Court for the Southern District of New York, United States, which established that exact photographic copies of images in the public domain could not be protected by copyright, because they lack originality. Even when a great deal of skill, experience, or effort is required to obtain accurate copies, it is a process that lacks originality, which is the key element in claiming copyright under United States law.. The decision applies only to two-dimensional images such as paintings.
Several federal courts have followed the decision of the Bridgeman case, although it is yet to be specifically confirmed by the United States Supreme Court. However, the Court's decision in Feist v. Rural, which explicitly rejects the difficulty of labor or monetary expense in obtaining copyright, »), seems to support the reasoning behind the Bridgeman case.
Facts
The Corel company sold a CD-ROM called the "Professional Photo Masters CD ROM," which contained digitized images of paintings by European masters in the UK, US and Canada. Corel stated that it had obtained these images from a company called "Off the Wall Images", a company that no longer existed.
Bridgeman Art Library maintained a large library of photographs of paintings by European masters, both on transparencies and in digital form. The copyright terms on the paintings had expired, but Bridgeman claimed that he owned the copyright on the photographic reproductions. Bridgeman allowed these reproductions to be licensed for a fee.
Relevance
For public encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, it assumes that it is legally possible under US law to use photographic images of non-copyrighted paintings, although whether this could apply to existing paintings in art galleries remains to be shown European (in the UK museums retain copyright on their reproductions and this has not been disputed) or from the rest of the world, or to photographs obtained by Europeans.