After a while, a Wal-Mart employee accosts me and tells me that I can’t do that because those images are “Copyright to the studios that took them.” I look down at my pictures. The picture she is pointing to is one of my great grandmother, taken about 1925. She has been dead since 1998.
I can’t speak for Wal-Mart specifically but I would guess that the minimum wage employee monitoring the photo center was handed a pamphlet by the corporate training staff about Copyright and suddenly became an “expert”. Even granting the utterly ridiculous premise that the images this chap was scanning were Copyrighted, its not the store’s place to judge such things.
Thanks to the media industry groups who have tried to make it a crime to do anything with their products other than buy them, there is a dangerous misconception about Copyright in many circles. The concept of Fair Use is never NEVER mentioned in any talk about Copyright. Again, assuming the pictures WERE Copyrighted, there would still be any number of completely legal grounds for anyone to make a scan of it. For use in an academic paper for instance.
I keep telling my kids that before they leave high school they will have an experience where someone in a nominal position of authority will take it upon themselves to arbitrarily trample one or more of their rights. Today Wal-Mart, tomorrow Starbucks, next month it will be some random maintenace guy at the park who claims that playing my MP3s loud enough for others to hear constitutes illegal rebroadcast and will try to make a citizens arrest on my music player.
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