Copyfraud

[2][3] Because copyfraud carries little or no oversight by authorities and few legal consequences, it exists on a massive scale, with millions of works in the public domain falsely labelled as copyrighted.

False copyright claims lead individuals to pay unnecessarily for licenses and to forgo entirely projects that make legitimate uses of public domain materials.

[6] Mazzone argues that copyfraud is usually successful because there are few and weak laws criminalizing false statements about copyrights, lax enforcement of such laws, few people who are competent to give legal advice on the copyright status of material and few people willing to risk a lawsuit to resist the fraudulent licensing fees that resellers demand.

[4] Companies that sell public domain material under false claims of copyright often require the buyer to agree to a contract commonly referred to as a license.

[14] Knowing that the penalty for making a false copyright claim on a copied government publication is small, some publishers simply ignore the laws.

One famous court case which explained that was Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. in 1999: The "skill, labor or judgment merely in the process of copying cannot confer originality".

[19] According to Mazzone, archives and museums typically assert ownership of copyrights where none exist, and wrongly require users to agree to their license and terms and conditions.

[1]: 17  Former president of the Society of American Archivists, Peter Hirtle, has written that "many repositories would like to maintain a kind of quasi-copyright-like control over the further use of materials in their holding, comparable to the monopoly granted to a copyright owner.

[21] In the United Kingdom, it remains common for museums and repositories to claim rights over images of material in their collections and to charge reproduction fees.

They commented that "[m]useums claim they create a new copyright when making a faithful reproduction of a 2D artwork by photography or scanning, but it is doubtful that the law supports this".

They argued that the fees inhibit the dissemination of knowledge, the very purpose of public museums and galleries, and so "pose a serious threat to art history".

[23] A November 2023 Appeal Court judgement (THJ v. Sheridan, 2023) by Lord Justice Arnold clarified that, in the UK, no new copyright is created in making a photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain artwork.

These circumstances have produced fraud on an untold scale, with millions of works in the public domain deemed copyrighted, and countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free.

[4]He also adds that "copyfraud upsets the constitutional balance and undermines First Amendment values", chilling free expression and stifling creativity.

[4]: 1036  Section 512(f) additionally punishes using the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove material the issuer knows is not infringing.

American legal scholar Paul J. Heald wrote that payment demands for spurious copyright infringement might be resisted in civil lawsuits under a number of commerce-law theories: (1) Breach of warranty of title; (2) unjust enrichment; (3) fraud; and (4) false advertising.

[32] Heald cited a case in which the first of these theories was used successfully in a copyright context: Tams-Witmark Music Library v. New Opera Company.

[f] Cory Doctorow, in a 2014 Boing Boing article, noted the "widespread practice of putting restrictions on scanned copies of public domain books online" and the many "powerful entities who lobby online services for a shoot now/ask questions later approach to copyright takedowns, while the victims of the fraud have no powerful voice advocating for them.

"[34] Professor Tanya Asim Cooper wrote that Corbis's claims to copyright in its digital reproductions of public domain art images are "spurious ... abuses ... restricting access to art that belongs to the public by requiring payment of unnecessary fees and stifling the proliferation of new, creative expression, of 'Progress' that the Constitution guarantees.

[35] Charles Eicher pointed out the prevalence of copyfraud with respect to Google Books, Creative Commons' efforts to "license" public domain works, and other areas.

Second-century bronze jug held by the British Museum , with false copyright claim, while on loan to Tullie House Museum
"Migrant mother", by Dorothea Lange
Camille Pissarro 's The Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1898)
Reproductions of public domain works by artists such as Van Gogh are often printed by museums with a questionable copyright notice. [ 4 ] : 1042
Modern editions of public domain books hundreds of years old, such as Adam Smith 's Wealth of Nations (1776), are often sold under a claim of copyright by the new publisher. [ 29 ]
This image from The White House 's Flickr account is free of copyright because it is a US federal government work. [ 37 ] Yet, it bears a false claim that the "photograph may not be manipulated in any way". [ 38 ]