[X] My Assistant

[Guest_spaceffm_*]

edited out

[dvandorn]

A copyright recognizes any significant value added to an intellectual property.

In the case here, spaceffm put together some very nice comparison murals. But *if* the work of scaling the images so that they were in proper scale to each other was done by someone else (especially by someone who took out a copyright, not on the images, but on the work he did to adjust each image to the proper scale), and *then* spaceffm claimed that he did the work to accurately scale the images, he would be making a false claim. It would be trying to take credit for someone else's work -- work that the someone else spent enough time and energy on, and added enough value to the images' presentations by doing the scaling calculations and manipulating the images accordingly, that he felt the value he added was worthy of its own copyright.

So, if spaceffm were to produce paper copies of these murals and sell them, or even if he were to insist on being credited if the murals were shown elsewhere on the Internet, the issue a copyright court would consider would be whether or not spaceffm had added any significant value to the images, as manipulated and copyrighted by Tayfun Oner. If spaceffm could prove that he did all the work to scale and manipulate all the images in his own murals, then he would win the suit. Just because Oner had made such scaled images doesn't preclude anyone else from doing it -- as long as they do the work and don't just use Oner's pre-scaled images without attribution. However, if all spaceffm did was re-arrange the elements of similar comparison murals made by Oner, without actually doing any of the scaling and image manipulation itself, then he would lose the suit.

In fact, even if spaceffm did almost all of the scaling himself, if he used even *one* pre-scaled image taken from someone else's work and deliberately passed it off as his own work, he would lose the suit.

-the other Doug