Did The AP Claim Copyright On Public Domain NASA Pictures?

You might recall that we got into a bit of... a "dispute" with Caters News Agency a few weeks back, after we noticed some monkey self-portraits in UK papers with a big "copyright" notice -- despite the fact that the images were almost certainly in the public domain.

However, I'm beginning to wonder if some UK papers just stamp a totally bogus copyright notice on batches of images. That's because ken points us to another article at the Daily Mail (where we also saw the monkey photos) and worries that it looks like the Associated Press is claiming copyright on images taken from the International Space Station, over which it holds no copyright: Now, I'm hardly one to shy away from knocking the AP for questionable behavior, but I do wonder if the AP really is claiming copyright on this image, or if it's just that the Daily Mail doesn't understand copyright. That's because above the image stamped with © AP are two images stamped with © YouTube. Here's one: And yet... the article even admits (directly) that these images came from Videographer Noe Castillo, who uploaded the clips to YouTube. But, of course, that doesn't mean YouTube gets the copyright. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if the photo editors at the Daily Mail are just clueless, and think that a copyright symbol like that is the way you acknowledge where you found something. That's the only explanation I can come up with for the images tagged © YouTube. So let's give the AP the benefit of the doubt (for the moment, at least), and assume that it wasn't claiming copyright over an image for which it doesn't hold the rights, but rather that the Daily Mail is a bit excessive in putting copyright notices on things where they don't belong.

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Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110725/05302515238/did-ap-claim-copyright-public-domain-nasa-pictures.shtml

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