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Originally Posted by Finch
I'm far from being a lawyer, but I find it hard to believe that you can't display an image of something that you own...even if you are selling it.
Could Ford say that someone couldn't feature a photo of their '72 Mustang in an eBay auction...?
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Though I definitely don't condone the unmitigated gall of Wolfgang's Vault and their copyright thuggery, I'd point out that the '72 Mustang is not a copyrighted item. (The picture of it is, but whoever took the picture owns the copyright on that... but that's beside the point.)
I think the legal theory WV bases their offensive position on is that under copyright laws of many countries, you can infringe by making a copyrighted image
publicly available for others to infringe. Because of the nature of the Internet, any time someone posts an image of a poster, even if there's no infringement by that posting, it's making it available for others to copy and put to some infringing use. So WV is pre-empting potential infringement by slamming down on anybody putting their images on the net.
Personally, I feel this is a classic example of overprotection of intellectual property. If the Internet's utilitarian benefits were valued more by people writing copyright legislation, this kind of infringement would probably be much more narrowly defined. But both the 1998 US revision of the Copyright Act (the DMCA) and the EU Copyright Directives of the last few years have taken corporate-friendly slants on the "making available" type of infringement on the Internet. That's the deck we're currently playing with.