I'll eventually have a list....., page 1

Rush,

The ISS sounds like a very good topic. Looking forward to seeing that article.

About the copyright issue regarding images, I wanted to add some comments to what has been said here already. Images that are copyrighted are sometimes still legal to use, if it's for a journalistic article or, perhaps, an encyclopedic article and the image fits in according to certain conditions. I'm not entirely sure about the rules, and perhaps I'm not entirely alone in that: what I'm talking about is what's called Fair Use. (I recommend reading about it in Wikipedia, which should give at least some understanding of this fairly complicated Fair Use topic..)

In addition to Fair Use, it's also legal to use images that are in what's called the Public Domain, which basically means it can be used totally freely, I think. Such images include old photographs that are so old that copyright no longer applies (maybe the age limit is 70 years or something?, I'm not entirely sure). A photograph can also be Public Domain if the creator of the work has specificially released it as such. A creator of a work may also release under various other conditions that also make it possible to use the picture, for example the GNU documentation license (used by Wikipedia material, and various open source software, I think is the primary use of that license), or some Creative Commons license (which is what tinWiki material is published under).

A work does, as I understand it, anyway, not always have to be expressly stated as being copyrighted for it to actually be so. If you create a work, you do automatically own the intellectual property rights to that work, is what I think is the case. Still, the Fair Use laws often make it possible to display certain images regardless.

This whole topic is fairly complicated, at least it seems that way to me.

Some general rules for when to use an image, that could be good to follow:

- It's clearly stated by the creator that the image is released for use, either freely (public domain) or by GNU or Creative Commons
- The image is too old for copyright to apply
- Use in the given tinWiki article is believed to constitute Fair Use

If these rules are followed, and the copyright owner shows up here demanding that his work is removed, then I at least hope it's alright if that's just done at the copyright owner's request, and that no further trouble comes from it if the image is then removed. tinWiki is after all not using the images commercially, since this is a free site, and as I understand it there is no personal profit from the ad revenue here, other than the income going back to the expenses of running the site itself (bandwidth or something like that).

Of course, if the creator gives special permission, all is well. Also, sometimes tinWiki users have created original images themselves, and William One Sac has also gotten some people in the ATS art forum involved in contributing images to tinWiki.

Hope this I tried to say here made some sense. :-)

Optimist