Quote:If you wanna be petty about the whole situation, the coin belongs to the Government of Canada and the
RCM. It is their property which is why it is illegal to melt.
Wrong. The coin in question was minted by the Heaton Mint, but ownership of that "image" would have belonged to
The Royal Mint (as per to the laws of the day, in Great Britain). The
Royal Canadian Mint did not exist until 1908.
Copyright is automatic, thanks to the Berne Convention. At the moment of creation, when the artwork is fixed in some tangible form, copyright applies automatically. For a photographer, when you press the shutter release you are making a photo and gaining copyright to that photo at the same time. You dont have to declare copyright or file any paperwork. It is yours to keep until you explicitly give it away or you die (Canadian copyright expires after you, i.e., authors lifetime plus 50 years). Do not confuse copyright with intellectual property...
For coins prior to 1937, the copyright to the images on Canadian coins has expired. Yet, one has to be dance carefully around that, when dealing with the 1908-1998 and 2010 special
RCM sets and the 2012 silver 1-cent images. For coins dating from 1937, it is different. For example, when some designs created by one George Kruger Gray, who died in 1943. In any event, Section 12 of the Copyright Act would put the image into the public domain no later than 50 years from creation, namely in 1987, assuming that the Mint, in 1937, was an emanation of the Crown under the direction and control of His Majesty, as Her Majesty then was. And even if that isn't right for whatever reason, any possible copyright that Mr. Gray could have had would have expired and gone into the public domain no later than 1993, fifty years after he expired. Those images are now in the public domain. Even so, the
Royal Canadian Mint claims ownership of all images of those coins, because they continue to use them. Here is a recent example...
http://www.newswire.ca/fr/story/566...l-governmentThat said, for "modern coins" what we are creating is classified as "derivative works". You are, in essence, copying what the engravers and the
Royal Canadian Mint hold the copyright to. You can take all the photos you want, of their "art" but you cannot claim copyright or gain financially from images of their coins. You could claim copyright, for example with thematic groups of coins, or creating art using coins, or by adding colour to coins.
http://www.mint.ca/store/mint/about...erty-1800010Should you want to claim copyright, using a coin from the
Royal Canadian Mint, you have to use this form:
http://www.mint.ca/store/dyn/PDFs/R...ation_v1.pdfThe Bank of Canada has their own form as well. But, the Mint's policies, unlike those of the Bank, do not start with the premise that no permission is required for purposes of photos or filming, and so technically permission should be sought in order to avoid a potential infringement claim.
I am sure there is a legal agreement in place with the
RCNA and Trajan Publishing (Canadian Coin News) and the
RCM regarding images used in their publications. I know that the Charlton Press has such an agreement. I imagine individual
ebay sellers are not worth their time, but they were quick to go after that artist using an image of the 1-cent last year (which was quickly rescinded)...
http://www.mint.ca/store/news/state...out+the+Mint"Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search." -- J. Robert OppenheimerContent of this post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses...0/deed.en_USMy
eBay store
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Posted 01/06/2013 09:35 am
....I did forget about the 50 year rule.
